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A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 



HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 



AGNES REPPLIER, Litt. D. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1908 






U3 



COPYRIGHT, I90S, BY AGNES REPPLIER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published September jqo8 



TO 
J. WILLIAM WHITE 



PREFACE 

The half -century, whose more familiar aspects 
this little book is designed to illustrate, has 
spread its boundary lines. Nothing is so hard 
to deal with as a period. Nothing is so un- 
manageable as a date. People will be born a 
few years too early ; they will live a few years 
too long. Events will happen out of time. The 
closely linked decades refuse to be separated, 
and my half- century, that I thought so com- 
pact, widened imperceptibly while I wrote. 

I have filled my canvas with trivial things, 
with intimate details, with what now seem the 
insignificant aspects of life. But the insignifi- 
cant aspects of life concern us mightily while 
we live ; and it is by their help that we under- 
stand the insignificant people who are some- 
times reckoned of importance. A hundred 
years ago many men and women were reckoned 
of importance, at whose claims their successors 
to-day smile scornfully. Yet they and their 



viM PREFACE 

work were woven into the tissue of things, into 
the warp and woof of social conditions, into 
the literary history of England. An hour is 
not too precious to waste upon them, however 
feeble their pretensions. Perhaps some idle 
reader in the future will do as much by us. 

A. E. 



CONTENTS 

A Happy Half -Century 1 

The Perils of Immortality .... 16 

When Lalla Rookh was Young .... 32 

The Correspondent 51 

The Novelist 73 

On the Slopes of Parnassus .... 94 

The Literary Lady 116 

The Child 138 

The Educator 155 

The Pietist 177 

The Accursed Annual 196 

Our Accomplished Great-Grandmother . . 217 

The Album Amicorum 234 



"A Happy Half-Century," "The Perila of Immortality," and "The 
Correspondent" appeared first ia Harper'' s Magazine, "Our Accom- 
plished Great-Grandmother" in Harper'' s Bazar, and "On the Slopes 
of Parnassus" in the Atlantic Monthly; they are here reprinted by 
permission of the publishers of those magazines. 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

This damn'd unmasculine canting* age ! 

Ghables Lamb. 

There are few of us who do not occasionally 
wish we had been born in other days, in days 
for which we have some secret affinity, and 
which shine for us with a mellow light in the 
deceitful pages of history. Mr. Austin Dobson, 
for example, must have sighed more than once 
to see Queen Anne on Queen Victoria's throne; 
and the Rt. Hon. Cecil Rhodes must have real- 
ized that the reign of Elizabeth was the reign 
for him. There is a great deal lost in being 
born out of date. What freak of fortune thrust 
Galileo into the world three centuries too soon, 
and held back Richard Burton's restless soul 
until he was three centuries too late? 

For myself, I confess that the last twenty- 
five years of the eighteenth century and the 
first twenty-five years of the nineteenth make 
up my chosen period, and that my motive for 
so choosing is contemptible. It was not a 



2 A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

time distinguished — in England at least — 
for wit or wisdom, for public virtues or for 
private charm ; but it was a time when literary 
reputations were so cheaply gained that nobody 
needed to despair of one. A taste for platitudes, 
a tinge of Pharisaism, an appreciation of the 
commonplace, — and the thing was done. It 
was in the latter haK of this blissful period 
that we find that enthusiastic chronicler, Mrs. 
Cowley, writing in "Public Characters" of 
" the proud preeminence which, in all the vari- 
eties of excellence produced by the pen, the 
pencil, or the lyre, the ladies of Great Britain 
have attained over contemporaries in every 
other country in Europe." 

When we search for proofs of this proud 
preeminence, what do we find? Roughly speak- 
ing, the period begins with Miss Burney, and 
closes with Miss Terrier and Miss Jane Por- 
ter. It includes — besides Miss Burney — 
one star of the first magnitude, Miss Austen 
(whose light never dazzled Mrs. Cowley's eyes), 
and one mild but steadfast planet. Miss Edge- 
worth. The rest of Great Britain's literary 
ladies were enjoying a degree of fame and for- 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 3 

tune so utterly disproportionate to their merits 
that their toiling successors to-day may be par- 
doned for wishing themselves part of that 
happy sisterhood. Think of being able to find 
a market for an interminable essay entitled 
"Against Inconsistency in our Expectations"! 
There lingers in all our hearts a desire to utter 
moral platitudes, to dwell lingeringly and lov- 
ingly upon the obvious ; but alas ! we are not 
Mrs. Barbaulds, and this is not the year 1780. 
Foolish and inconsequent we are permitted to 
be, but tedious, never ! And think of hearing 
one's own brother burst into song, that he 
might fondly eulogize our 

Sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise, 
Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise. 

There are few things more difficult to conceive 
than an enthusiastic brother tunefully entreat- 
ing his sister to go on enrapturing the world 
with her pen. Oh, thrice-favoured Anna Le- 
titia Barbauld, who could warm even the calm 
fraternal heart into a glow of sensibility. 

The publication of " Evelina " was the first 
notable event in our happy half-century. Its 
freshness and vivacity charmed all London ; 



4 A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

and Miss Burney, like Sheridan, had her ap- 
plause "dashed in her face, sounded in her 
ears," for the rest of a long and meritorious 
life. Her second novel, " Cecilia," was received 
with such universal transport, that in a very 
moral epilogue of a rather immoral play we 
find it seriously commended to the public as 
an antidote to vice : — 

Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause, 
Whose every passion yields to nature's laws. 

Miss Burney, blushing in the royal box, had 
the satisfaction of hearing this stately adver- 
tisement of her wares. Virtue was not left to 
be its own reward in those fruitful and gener- 
ous years. 

Indeed, the most comfortable characteristic 
of the period, and the one which incites our 
deepest envy, is the universal willingness to 
accept a good purpose as a substitute for good 
work. Even Madame d'Arblay, shrewd, caus- 
tic, and quick-witted, forbears from unkind 
criticism of the well-intentioned. She has no- 
thing but praise for Mrs. Barbauld's poems, be- 
cause of " the piety and worth they exhibit " ; 
and she rises to absolute enthusiasm over the 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 5 

antislavery epistle, declaring that its energy 
" springs from the real spirit of virtue." Yet 
to us the picture of the depraved and luxuri- 
ous West Indian ladies — about whom it is 
safe to say good Mrs. Barbauld knew very 
little — seems one of the most unconsciously 
humorous things in English verse. 

Lo ! where reclined, pale Beauty courts the breeze, 
Diffused on sofas of voluptuous ease. 

With languid tones imperious mandates urge, 
With arm recumbent wield the household scourge. 

There are moments when Mrs. Barbauld soars 
to the inimitable, when she reaches the highest 
and happiest effect that absurdity is able to 
produce. 

With arm recumbent wield the household scourge 

is one of these inspirations ; and another is this 
pregnant sentence, which occurs in a chapter 
of advice to young girls : " An ass is much 
better adapted than a horse to show off a 
lady." 

To point to Hannah More as a brilliant and 
bewildering example of sustained success is to 
give the most convincing proof that it was a 



6 A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

good thing to be born in the year 1745. Miss 
More's reputation was already established at 
the dawning of my cherished half-century, and, 
for the whole fifty years, her life was a series 
of social, literary, and religious triumphs. In 
her youth, she was mistaken for a wit. In her 
old age, she was revered as a saint. In her 
youth, Garrick called her " Nine," — gracefully 
intimating that she embodied the attributes of 
all the Muses. In her old age, an acquaintance 
wrote to her : " You who are secure of the 
approbation of angels may well hold human 
applause to be of small consequence." In her 
youth, she wrote a play that everybody went 
to see. In her old age, she wrote tracts that 
everybody bought and distributed. Prelates 
composed Latin verses in her honour; and 
when her " Estimate of the Religion of the 
Fashionable World " was published anony- 
mously, the Bishop of London exclaimed in 
a kind of pious transport, "Aut Morus, aut 
Angelus! " Her tragedy, " Percy," melted the 
heart of London. Men " shed tears in abun- 
dance," and women were " choked with emotion " 
over the " affecting circumstances of the Piece." 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 7 

Sir William Pepys confessed that " Percy '* 
"broke his heart " ; and that he thought it "a 
kind of profanation " to wipe his eyes, and go 
from the theatre to Lady Harcourt's assembly. 
Four thousand copies of the play were sold in 
a fortnight ; and the Duke of Northumberland 
sent a special messenger to Miss More to 
thank her for the honour she had done his 
historic name. 

As a novelist, Hannah was equally success- 
ful. Twenty thousand copies of " Coelebs in 
Search of a Wife " were sold in England, and 
thirty thousand in America. " The Americans 
are a very approving people," acknowledged 
the gratified authoress. In Iceland " Coelebs " 
was read — so Miss More says — " with great 
apparent profit " ; while certain very popular 
tracts, like " Charles the Footman " and " The 
Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," made their edi- 
fying way to Moscow, and were found by the 
missionary Gericke in the library of the Rajah 
of Tanjore. " All this and Heaven, too ! " as a 
reward for being born in 1745. The injustice 
of the thing stings us to the soul. Yet it was 
the unhesitating assumption of Heaven's co- 



8 A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

partnership wMch gave to Hannah More the 
best part of her earthly prestige, and made her 
verdicts a little like Protestant Bulls. When 
she objected to " Marmion " and " The Lady 
of the Lake " for their lack of " practical pre- 
cept," these sinless poems were withdrawn from 
Evangelical bookshelves. Her biographer, Mr. 
Thompson, thought it necessary to apologize 
for her correspondence with that agreeable 
worldling, Horace Walpole, and to assure us 
that " the fascinations of Walpole's false wit 
must have retired before the bright ascendant 
of her pure and prevailing superiority." As 
she waxed old, and affluent, and disputatious, 
it was deemed well to encourage a timid pub- 
lic with the reminder that her genius, though 
"great and coromanding," was still " lovely and 
kind." And when she died, it was recorded 
that " a cultivated taste for moral scenery was 
one of her distinctions " ; — as though Nature 
herseK attended a class of ethics before ven- 
turing to allure too freely the mistress of Bar- 
ley Wood. 

It is in the contemplation of such sunlight 
mediocrity that the hardship of being born too 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 9 

late is felt with crushing force. Why cannot 
we write " Letters on the Improvement of the 
Mind/' and be held, like Mrs. Chapone, to be 
an authority on education all the rest of our 
lives ; and have people entreating us, as they 
entreated her, to undertake, at any cost, the 
intellectual guidance of their daughters? When 
we consider all that a modern educator is 
expected to know — from bird-calls to metric 
measures — we sigh over the days which de- 
manded nothing more difficult than the polite 
expression of truisms. 

" Our feelings are not given us for our orna- 
ment, but to spur us on to right action. Com- 
passion, for instance, is not impressed upon the 
human heart, only to adorn the fair face with 
tears, and to give an agreeable languor to the 
eyes. It is designed to excite our utmost en- 
deavour to relieve the sufferer." 

Was it reaUy worth while to say this even 
in 1775 ? Is it possible that young ladies were 
then in danger of thinking that the office of 
compassion was to " adorn a face with tears "? 
and did they try to be sorry for the poor and 
sick, only that their bright eyes might be soft- 



10 A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

ened into languor? Yet we know that Mrs. 
Chapone's little volume was held to have ren- 
dered signal service to society. It has the hon- 
our to be one of the books which Miss Lydia 
Languish lays out ostentatiously on her table 

— in company with Fordyce's sermons — when 
she anticipates a visit from Mrs. Malaprop 
and Sir Anthony. Some halting verses of the 
period exalt it as the beacon light of youth ; 
and Mrs. Delany, writing to her six-year-old 
niece, counsels the little girl to read the 
" Letters " once a year until she is grown up. 
"They speak to the heart as well as to the 
head," she assures the poor infant; "and I 
know no book (next to the Bible) more enter- 
taining and edifying." 

Mrs. Montagu gave dinners. The real and 
very solid f oimdation of Tier reputation was the 
admirable manner in which she fed her lions. 
A mysterious halo of intellectuality surrounded 
this excellent hostess. " The female Maecenas 
of Hill Street," Hannah More elegantly termed 
her, adding, — to prove that she herself was 
not unduly influenced by gross food and drink, 

— " But what are baubles, when speaking of 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 11 

a Montagu ! " Dr. Johnson praised her con- 
versation, — especially when he wanted to tease 
jealous Mrs. Thrale, — but sternly discounte- 
nanced her attempts at authorship. When Sir 
Joshua Keynolds observed that the "Essay on 
the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare " did 
its authoress honour, Dr. Johnson retorted 
contemptuously : " It does her honour, but it 
would do honour to nobody else," — which 
strikes me as a singularly unpleasant thing to 
hear said about one's literary masterpiece. 
Like the fabled Caliph who stood by the Sul- 
tanas throne, translating the flowers of Per- 
sian speech into comprehensible and unflatter- 
ing truths, so Dr. Johnson stands undeceived 
in this pleasant half -century of pretence, trans- 
lating its ornate nonsense into language we 
can too readily understand. 

But how comfortable and how comforting 
the pretence must have been, and how kindly 
tolerant all the pretenders were to one another ! 
If, in those happy days, you wrote an essay on 
"The Harmony of Numbers and Versifica- 
tion," you unhesitatingly asked your friends to 
come and have it read aloud to them ; and your 



12 A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

friends — instead of leaving town next day — 
came, and listened, and called it a " Miltonic 
evening." If, like Mrs. Montagu, you had a 
taste for letter-writing, you filled up innumer- 
able sheets with such breathless egotisms as 
this: — 

" I come, a happy guest, to the general feast 
Nature spreads for all her children, my spirits 
dance in the sunbeams, or take a sweet repose 
in the shade. I rejoice in the grand chorus of 
the day, and feel content in the silent serene 
of night, while I listen to the morning hymn 
of the whole animal creation, I recollect how 
beautiful it is, sum'd up in the works of our 
great poet, Milton, every rivulet murmurs in 
poetical cadence, and to the melody of the 
nightingale I add the harmonious verses she 
has inspired in many languages." 

So highly were these rhapsodies appreciated, 
and so far were correspondents from demand- 
ing either coherence or punctuation, that four 
volumes of Mrs. Montagu's letters were pub- 
lished after her death ; and we find Miss More 
praising Mrs. Boscawen because she approached 
this standard of excellence : " Mrs. Palk tells 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 13 

me her letters are hardly inferior to Mrs. Mon- 
tagu's." 

Those were the days to live in, and sensi- 
ble people made haste to be born in time. The 
close of the eighteenth century saw quiet 
country families tearing the freshly published 
" Mysteries of Udolpho " into a dozen parts, 
because no one could wait his turn to read the 
book. All England held its breath while Emily 
explored the haunted chambers of her prison- 
house. The beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury found Mrs. Opie enthroned as a peerless 
novel-writer, and the " Edinburgh Keview " 
praising "Adeline Mowbray, or Mother and 
Daughter," as the most pathetic story in the 
English language. Indeed, one sensitive gen- 
tleman wrote to its authoress that he had lain 
awake all night, bathed in tears, after reading 
it. About this time, too, we begin to hear " the 
mellow tones of Felicia Hemans," whom Chris- 
topher North reverently admired ; and who, we 
are assured, found her way to all hearts that 
were open to " the holy sympathies of religion 
and virtue." Murray's heart was so open that 
he paid two hundred guineas for the " Vespers 



14 A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 

of Palermo " ; and Miss Edgeworth considered 
that tlie " Siege of Valencia " contained the 
most beautiful poetry she had read for years. 
Finally Miss Jane Porter looms darkly on the 
horizon, with novels five volumes long. All 
the Porters worked on a heroic scale. Anna 
Maria's stories were more interminable than 
Jane's ; and their brother Robert painted on a 
single canvas, " The Storming of Seringapa- 
tam," seven hundred life-sized figures. 

" Thaddeus of Warsaw " and " The Scottish 
Chiefs" were books famihar to our infancy. 
They stretched vastly and vaguely over many 
tender years, — stories after the order of Mel- 
chisedec, without beginning and without end. 
But when our grandmothers were young, and 
my chosen period had still years to run, they 
were read on two continents, and in many 
tongues. The King of Wiirtemberg was so 
pleased with " Thaddeus " that he made Miss 
Porter a " lady of the Chapter of St. Joachim," 
— which sounds both imposing and mysterious. 
The badge of the order was a gold cross ; and 
this unusual decoration, coupled with the lady's 
habit of draping herself in flowing veils like 



A HAPPY HALF-CENTTJRY 15 

one of Mrs. Kadcliffe's heroines, so confused 
an honest British public that it was deemed 
necessary to explain to agitated Protestants 
that Miss Porter had no Popish procKvities, 
and must not be mistaken for a nun. In our 
own country her novels were exceedingly popu- 
lar, and her American admirers sent her a rose- 
wood armchair in token of appreciation and 
esteem. It is possible she would have preferred 
a royalty on her books ; but the armchair was 
graciously accepted, and a pen-and-ink sketch 
in an album of celebrities represents Miss Por- 
ter seated majestically on its cushions, " in the 
quiet and ladylike occupation of taking a cup 
of coffee." 

And so my happy haK-century draws to its 
appointed end. A new era, cold, critical, con- 
tentious, deprecated the old genial absurdities, 
chilled the old sentimental outpourings, ques- 
tioned the old profitable pietism. Unfortunates, 
born a hundred years too late, look back with 
wistful eyes upon the golden age which they 
feel themselves qualified to adorn. 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

Peu de g6me, point de grace. 

There is no harder fate than to be immortal- 
ized as a fool ; to have one's name — which mer- 
its nothing sterner than obliteration — handed 
down to generations as an example of silliness, 
or stupidity, or presumption; to be enshrined 
pitilessly in the amber of the " Dunciad " ; to be 
laughed at forever because of Charles Lamb's 
impatient and inextinguishable raillery. When 
an industrious young authoress named Elizabeth 
Ogilvy Benger — a model of painstaking insig- 
nificance — invited Charles and Mary Lamb to 
drink tea with her one cold December night, she 
little dreamed she was achieving a deathless and 
unenviable fame ; and that, when her half dozen 
books should have lapsed into comfortable obliv- 
ion, she herself should never be fortunate enough 
to be forgotten. It is a cruel chance which crys- 
tallizes the folly of an hour, and makes it out- 
live our most serious endeavours. Perhaps we 
should do well to consider this painful possi- 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 17 

bility before hazarding an acquaintance with 
the Immortals. 

Miss Benger did more than hazard. She 
pursued the Immortals with insensate zeal. She 
bribed Mrs. Inchbald's servant-maid into lend- 
ing her cap, and apron, and tea-tray ; and, so 
equipped, penetrated into the inmost sanctuary 
of that literary lady, who seems to have taken 
the intrusion in good part. She was equally 
adroit in seducing Mary Lamb — as the Serpent 
seduced Eve — when Charles Lamb was the 
ultimate object of her designs. Coming home 
to dinner one day, " hungry as a hunter," he 
found to his dismay the two women closeted 
together, and trusted he was in time to prevent 
their exchanging vows of eternal friendship, 
though not — as he discovered later — in time 
to save himseK from an engagement to drink 
tea with the stranger (" I had never seen her 
before, and could not tell who the devil it was 
that was so familiar "), the following night. 

What happened is told in a letter to Cole- 
ridge ; one of the best-known and one of the long- 
est letters Lamb ever wrote, — he is so brimful 
of his grievance. Miss Benger's lodgings were 



18 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

up two flights of stairs in East Street. She enter- 
tained her guests with tea, coffee, macaroons, 
and " much love." She talked to them, or rather 
at them, upon purely literary topics, — as, for 
example. Miss Hannah More's " Strictures on 
Female Education," which they had never read. 
She addressed Mary Lamb in French, — " pos- 
sibly having heard that neither Mary nor I 
understood French," — and she favoured them 
with Miss Seward's opinion of Pope. She 
asked Lamb, who was growing more miserable 
every minute, if he agreed with D'Israeli as to the 
influence of organism upon intellect ; and when 
he tried to parry the question with a pun upon 
organ — " which went off very flat " — she de- 
spised him for his feeble flippancy. She advised 
Mary to carry home two translations of " Pi- 
zarro," so that she might compare them verba- 
tim (an offer hastily declined), and she made 
them both promise to return the following week 
— which they never did — to meet Miss Jane 
Porter and her sister, "who, it seems, have 
heard much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet 
us because we are his friends." It is a comedie 
larmoyante. We sympathize hotly with Lamb 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 19 

when we read his letter ; but there is something 
piteous in the thought of the poor little hostess 
going complacently to bed that night, and never 
realizing that she had made her one unhappy 
flight to fame. 

There were people, strange as it may seem, 
who liked Miss Benger's evenings. Miss Aikin 
assures us that " her circle of acquaintances 
extended with her reputation, and with the 
knowledge of her excellent qualities, and she 
was often enabled to assemble as guests at her 
humble tea-table names whose celebrity would 
have insured attention in the proudest salons 
of the metropolis." Crabb Kobinson, who was 
a frequent visitor, used to encounter large 
parties of sentimental ladies ; among them, Miss 
Porter, Miss Landon, and the " eccentric but 
amiable" Miss Wesley, — Jolm Wesley's niece, 
— who prided herself upon being broad-minded 
enough to have friends of varying religions, 
and who, having written two unread novels, re- 
marked complacently to Miss Edgeworth : " We 
sisters of the quiU ought to know one another." 

The formidable Lady de Crespigny of Cam- 
pion Lodge was also Miss Benger's condescend- 



20 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

ing friend and patroness, and this august ma- 
tron — of insipid mind and imperious temper — 
was held to sanctify in some mysterious man- 
ner aU whom she honoured with her notice. 
The praises lavished upon Lady de Crespigny 
by her contemporaries would have made Hy- 
patia blush, and Sappho hang her head. Like 
Mrs. Jarley, she was the delight of the nobility 
and gentry. She corresponded, so we are told, 
with the literati of England; she published, 
like a British Cornelia, her letters of counsel 
to her son ; she was " courted by the gay and 
admired by the clever " ; and she mingled at 
Campion Lodge " the festivity of fashionable 
parties with the pleasures of intellectual soci- 
ety, and the comforts of domestic peace." 

To this array of feminine virtue and femi- 
nine authorship. Lamb was singularly unre- 
sponsive. He was not one of the literati hon- 
oured by Lady de Crespigny's correspondence. 
He eluded the society of Miss Porter, though 
she was held to be handsome, — for a novelist. 
(" The only literary lady I ever knew," writes 
Miss Mitford, " who did n't look like a scare- 
crow to keep birds from cherries.") He said 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 21 

unkindly of Miss Landon that, if she belonged 
to him, he would lock her up and feed her on 
bread and water until she left off writing poe- 
try. And for Miss Wesley he entertained a 
cordial animosity, only one degree less lively 
than his sentiments towards Miss Benger. 
Miss Wesley had a lamentable habit of send- 
ing her effusions to be read by reluctant men 
of letters. She asked Lamb for Coleridge's ad- 
dress, which he, to divert the evil from his own 
head, cheerfully gave. Coleridge, very angry, 
reproached his friend for this disloyal base- 
ness ; but Lamb, with the desperate instinct of 
self-preservation, refused all promise of amend- 
ment. "You encouraged that mopsey. Miss 
Wesley, to dance after you," he wrote tartly, 
" in the hope of having her nonsense put into 
a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well 
shaken her off by that simple expedient of 
referring her to you ; but there are more burs 
in the wind." . . . " Of all God's creatures," 
he cries again, in an excess of ill-humour, " I 
detest letters-affecting, authors-hunting ladies." 
Alas for Miss Benger when she hunted hard, 
and the quarry turned at bay ! 



22 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

An atmosphere of inexpressible dreariness 
hangs over the little coterie of respectable, un- 
illuminated writers, who, to use Lamb's price- 
less phrase, encouraged one another in medioc- 
rity. A vapid propriety, a mawkish sensibility 
were their substitutes for real distinction of 
character or mind. They read Mary Wollstone- 
craft's books, but would not know the author ; 
and when, years later, Mrs. Gaskell presented 
the widowed Mrs. Shelley to Miss Lucy Aikin, 
that outraged spinster turned her back upon 
the erring one, to the profound embarrassment 
of her hostess. Of Mrs. Inchbald, we read in 
" Public Characters " for 1811 : " Her moral 
qualities constitute her principal excellence; 
and though useful talents and personal accom- 
plishments, of themselves, form materials for 
an agreeable picture, moral character gives the 
polish which fascinates the heart." The con- 
ception of goodness then in vogue is pleasingly 
illustrated by a passage from one of Miss 
Elizabeth Hamilton's books, which Miss Ben- 
ger in her biography of that lady (now lost to 
fame) quotes appreciatively : — 

" It was past twelve o'clock. Already had 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 23 

the active and judicious Harriet performed 
every domestic task ; and, having completely 
regulated the family economy for the day, was 
quietly seated at work with her aunt and sister, 
listening to Hume's ' History of England,' as 
it was read to her by some orphan girl whom 
she had herself instructed." 

So truly ladylike had the feminine mind 
grown by this time, that the very language it 
used was refined to the point of ambiguity. 
Mrs. Barbauld writes genteelly of the behav- 
iour of young girls " to the other half of their 
species," as though she could not bear to say, 
simply and coarsely, men. So full of content 
were the little circles who listened to the " ele- 
gant lyric poetess," Mrs. Hemans, or to " the 
female Shakespeare of her age," Miss Joanna 
Baillie (we owe both these phrases to the poet 
Campbell), that when Crabb Robinson was 
asked by Miss Wakefield whether he would 
like to know Mrs. Barbauld, he cried enthusi- 
astically : " You might as well ask me whether 
I should like to know the Angel Gabriel ! " 

In the midst of these sentimentalities and rap- 
tures, we catch now and then forlorn glimpses 



24 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

of the Immortals, — of Wordsworth at a liter- 
ary entertainment in the house of Mr. Hoare 
of Hampstead, sitting mute and miserable all 
evening in a corner, — which, as Miss Aikin 
truly remarked, was " disappointing and pro- 
voking " ; of Lamb carried by the indefati- 
gable Crabb Kobinson to call on Mrs. Barbauld. 
This visit appears to have been a distinct fail- 
ure. Lamb's one recorded observation was that 
Gilbert Wakefield had a peevish face, — an 
awkward remark, as Wakefield's daughter sat 
close at hand and listening. " Lamb," writes 
Mr. Robinson, " was vexed, but got out of the 
scrape tolerably well," — having had, indeed, 
plenty of former experiences to help him on 
the way. 

There is a delightful passage in Miss Jane 
Porter's diary which describes at length an 
evening spent at the house of Mrs. Fenwick, 
" the amiable authoress of ' Secrecy.' " (Every- 
body was the amiable authoress of something. 
It was a day, like our own, given over to the 
worship of ink.) The company consisted of 
Miss Porter and her sister Maria, Miss Benger 
and her brother, the poet Campbell, and his 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 25 

nephew, a young man barely twenty years of 
age. The lion of the little party was of course 
the poet, who endeared himself to Mrs. Fen- 
wick's heart by his attentions to her son, " a 
beautiful boy of six." 

" This child's innocence and caresses," writes 
Miss Porter gushingly, " seemed to unbend the 
lovely feelings of Campbell's heart. Every re- 
straint but those which the guardian angels of 
tender infancy acknowledge was thrown aside. 
I never saw Man in a more interesting point 
of view. I felt how much I esteemed the author 
of the ' Pleasures of Hope.' When we returned 
home, we walked. It was a charming summer 
night. The moon shone brightly, Maria leaned 
on Campbell's arm. I did the same by Benger's. 
Campbell made some observations on pedantic 
women. I did not like it, being anxious for 
the respect of this man. I was jealous about 
how nearly he might think we resembled that 
character. When the Bengers parted from us, 
Campbell observed my abstraction, and with 
sincerity I confessed the cause. I know not 
what were his replies ; but they were so grati- 
fying, so endearing, so marked with truth, that 



26 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

when we arrived at the door, and he shook us 
by the hand, as a sign of adieu immediately 
prior to his next day's journey to Scotland, 
we parted with evident marks of being aU in 
tears." 

It is rather disappointing, after this outburst 
of emotion, to find Campbell, in a letter to 
his sister, describing Miss Porter in language 
of chilling moderation : " Among the company 
was Miss Jane Porter, whose talents my nephew 
adores. She is a pleasing woman, and made 
quite a conquest of him." 

Miss Benger was only one of the many 
aspirants to literary honours whose futile en- 
deavours vexed and affronted Charles Lamb. 
In reality she burdened him far less than 
others who, like Miss Betham and Miss Stod- 
dart, succeeded in sending him their verses for 
criticism, or who begged him to forward the 
effusions to Southey, — an office he gladly ful- 
filled. Perhaps Miss Benger's vivacity jarred 
upon his taste. He was fastidious about the 
gayety of women. Madame de Stael considered 
her one of the most interesting persons she 
had met in England; but the approval of this 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 27 

" impudent clever " Frenchwoman would have 
been the least possible recommendation to 
Lamb. If he had known how hard had been 
Miss Benger's struggles, and how scanty her 
rewards, he might have forgiven her that sad 
perversity which kept her toiling in the field 
of letters. She had had the misfortune to be a 
precocious child, and had written at the age 
of thirteen a poem called " The Female Ge- 
niad," which was dedicated to Lady de Cres- 
pigny, and published under the patronage of 
that honoured dame. Youthful prodigies were 
then much in favour. Miss Mitford comments 
very sensibly upon them, being filled with pity 
for one Mary Anne Browne, " a fine tall girl 
of fourteen, and a full-fledged authoress," who 
was extravagantly courted and caressed one 
season, and cruelly ignored the next. The 
" Female Geniad " sealed Miss Benger's fate. 
When one has written a poem at thirteen, 
and that poem has been printed and praised, 
there is nothing for it but to keep on writ- 
ing until Death mercifully removes the obli- 
gation. 

It is needless to say that the drama — which 



28 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

then, as now, was the goal of every author's 
ambition — first fired Miss Benger's zeal. 
When we think of Miss Hannah More as a 
successful playwright, it is hard to understand 
how any one could fail ; yet fail Miss Benger 
did, although we are assured by her biographer 
that " her genius appeared in many ways well 
adapted to the stage." She next wrote a merci- 
lessly long poem upon the abolition of the slave 
trade (which was read only by anti-slavery agi- 
tators), and two novels, — " Marian," and 
"Valsinore: or, the Heart and the Fancy." 
Of these we are told that " their excellences 
were such as genius only can reach " ; and if 
they also missed their mark, it must have been 
because — as Miss Aikin delicately insinuates 
— "no judicious reader could fail to perceive 
that the artist was superior to the work." This 
is always unfortunate. It is the work, and not 
the artist, which is offered for sale in the market- 
place. Miss Benger's work is not much worse 
than a great deal which did sell, and she pos- 
sessed at least the grace of an unflinching and 
courageous perseverance. Deliberately, and 
without aptitude or training, she began to write 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 29 

history, and in this most difficult of all fields 
won for herself a hearing. Her " Life of Anne 
Boleyn," and her " Memoirs of Mary, Queen 
of Scots," were read in many an English school- 
room ; their propriety and Protestantism making 
them acceptable to the anxious parental mind. 
A single sentence from " Anne Boleyn " wiU 
suffice to show the ease of Miss Benger's men- 
tal attitude, and the comfortable nature of her 
views : — 

" It would be ungrateful to forget that the 
mother of Queen Elizabeth was the early and 
zealous advocate of the Eeformation, and that, 
by her efforts to dispel the gloom of ignorance 
and superstition, she conferred on the English 
people a benefit of which, in the present ad- 
vanced state of knowledge and civilization, it 
would be difficult to conceive or to appreciate 
the real value and importance." 

The " active and judicious Harriet " would 
have listened to this with as much complacence 
as to Hume. 

In " La Belle Assemblee " for April, 1823, 
there is an engraving of Miss Smirke's por- 
trait of Miss Benger. She is painted in an im- 



30 THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 

posing turban, with tight little curls, and an 
air of formidable sprigbtliness. It was this 
spriglitliness which was so much admired. 
" Wound up by a cup of coffee," she would 
talk for hours, and her friends reaUy seem to 
have liked it. " Her lively imagination," writes 
Miss Aikin, " and the flow of eloquence it in- 
spired, aided by one of the most melodious of 
voices, lent an inexpressible charm to her con- 
versation, which was heightened by an intuitive 
discernment of character, rare in itseK, and 
still more so in combination with such fertility 
of fancy and ardency of feeling." 

This leaves little to be desired. It is not at 
all like the Miss Benger of Lamb's letter, with 
her vapid pretensions and her stupid insolence. 
Unhappily, we see through Lamb's eyes, and 
we cannot see through Miss Aikin's. Of one 
thing only I feel sure. Had Miss Benger, 
instead of airing her trivial acquirements, told 
Lamb that when she was a little girl, bookless 
and penniless, at Chatham, she used to read 
the open volumes in the booksellers' windows, 
and go back again and again, hoping that the 
leaves might be turned, she would have touched 



THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 31 

a responsive chord in his heart. Who does not 
remember his exquisite sympathy for " street- 
readers," and his unlikely story of Martin 

B , who "got through two volumes of 

' Clarissa,' " in this desultory fashion. Had he 
but known of the shabby, eager child, staring 
wistfully at the coveted books, he would never 
have written the most amusing of his letters, 
and Miss Benger's name would be to-day un- 
known. 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

And give you, mixed vnth western sentimentalism, 
Some glimpses of the finest orientalism. 

" Stick to tlie East," wrote Byron to Moore, in 
1813. " The oracle, Stael, told me it was the 
only poetic policy. The North, South, and West 
have all been exhausted ; but from the East we 
have nothing but Southey's unsaleables, and 
these he has contrived to spoil by adopting only 
their most outrageous fictions. His personages 
don't interest us, and yours will. You will have 
no competitors ; and, if you had, you ought to 
be glad of it. The little I have done in that 
way is merely a ' voice in the wilderness ' for 
you ; and if it has had any success, that also will 
prove that the public are orientalizing, and pave 
the way for you." 

There is something admirably business-like 
in this advice. Byron, who four months before 
had sold the " Giaour " and the " Bride of Aby- 
dos" to Murray for a thousand guineas, was 
beginning to realize the commercial value of 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 33 

poetry ; and, like a true man of affairs, knew 
what it meant to corner a poetic market. He 
was generous enough to give Moore the tip, 
and to hold out a helping hand as well; for he 
sent him six volumes of Castellan's "Moeurs 
des Ottomans," and three volumes of Toderini's 
" De la Litterature des Turcs." The oriental- 
ism afforded by text-books was the kind that 
England loved. 

From the publication of "Lalla Rookh" in 
1817 to the publication of Thackeray's " Our 
Street " in 1847, Byron's far-sighted policy con- 
tinued to bear golden fruit. For thirty years 
Caliphs and Deevs, Brahmins and Circassians, 
rioted through English verse; mosques and 
seraglios were the stage properties of English 
fiction; the bowers of Kochnabed, the Lake of 
Cashmere, became as familiar as Kichmond and 
the Thames to English readers. Some feeble 
washings of this great tidal wave crossed the 
estranging sea, to tint the pages of the New 
York "Mirror," and kindred journals in the 
United States. Harems and slave-markets, with 
beautiful Georgians and sad, slender Arab girls, 
thrilled our grandmothers' kind hearts. Tales 



34 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

of Moorish Lochinvars, who snatch away the 
fair daughters — or perhaps the fair wives — 
of powerful rajahs, captivated their imagina- 
tions. Gazelles trot like poodles through these 
stories, and lend colour to their robust Saxon 
atmosphere. In one, a neglected "favourite" 
wins back her lord's affection by the help of a 
slave-girl's amulet ; and the inconstant Moslem, 
entering the harem, exclaims, " Beshrew me 
that I ever thought another fair!" — which 
sounds like a penitent Tudor. 

A Persian's Heaven is easily made, 
'T is but black eyes and lemonade ; 

and our oriental literature was compounded of 
the same simple ingredients. When the New 
York " Mirror," under the guidance of the ver- 
satile Mr. Willis, tried to be impassioned and 
sensuous, it dropped into such wanton lines as 
these to a " Sultana" : — 

She came, — soft leaning on her favourite's arm, 
She came, warm panting from the sultry hours, 
To rove mid fragrant shades of orange bowers, 
A veil light shadowing each voluptuous charm. 

And for this must Lord Byron stand respons- 
ible. 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 35 

The happy experiment of grafting Turkish 
roses upon English boxwood led up to some cu- 
rious complications, not the least of which was 
the necessity of stiffening the moral fibre of the 
Orient — which was esteemed to be but lax — 
until it could bear itself in seemly fashion be- 
fore English eyes. The England of 1817 was 
not, like the England of 1908, prepared to give 
critical attention to the decadent. It presented 
a solid front of denial to habits and ideas which 
had not received the sanction of British cus- 
tom ; which had not, through national adoption, 
become part of the established order of the uni- 
verse. The line of demarcation between Provi- 
dence and the constitution was lightly drawn, 
Jeffrey, a self-constituted arbiter of tastes and 
morals, assured his nervous countrymen that, 
although Moore's verse was glowing, his prin- 
ciples were sound. 

" The characters and sentiments of * Lalla 
Rookh ' belong to the poetry of rational, hon- 
ourable, considerate, and humane Europe ; and 
not to the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy 
of Asia. So far as we have yet seen, there is 
no sound sense, firmness of purpose, or princi- 



36 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

pled goodness, except among the natives of 
Europe and their genuine descendants." 

Starting with this magnificent assumption, 
it became a delicate and a difficult task to unite 
the customs of the East with the " principled 
goodness " of the West ; the " sound sense " of 
the Briton with the fervour and fanaticism of 
the Turk. Jeffrey held that Moore had effected 
this alliance in the most tactful manner, and 
had thereby "redeemed the character of ori- 
ental poetry " ; just as Mr. Thomas Haynes 
Bayly, ten years later, " reclaimed festive song 
from vulgarity." More carping critics, how- 
ever, worried their readers a good deal on this 
point ; and the nonconformist conscience cher- 
ished uneasy doubts as to Hafed's irregular 
courtship and Nourmahal's marriage lines. 
From across the sea came the accusing voice of 
young Mr. Channing in the " North American," 
proclaiming that " harlotry has found in Moore 
a bard to smooth her coarseness and veil her 
effrontery, to give her languor for modesty, 
and affectation for virtue." The English 
"Monthly Eeview," less open to alarm, con- 
fessed with a sigh "a depressing regret that, 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 37 

with the exception of ' Paradise and the Peri,' 
no great moral effect is either attained or at- 
tempted by ' Lalla Rookh.' To what purpose 
all this sweetness and delicacy of thought and 
language, all this labour and profusion of 
Oriental learning? What head is set right 
in one erroneous notion, what heart is softened 
in one obdurate feeling, by this luxurious 
quarto?" 

It is a lamentable truth that Anacreon ex- 
hibits none of Dante's spiritual depth, and that 
la reine Margot fell short of Queen Victoria's 
fireside qualities. Nothing could make a mor- 
alist of Moore. The light-hearted creature was a 
model of kindness, of courage, of conjugal fidel- 
ity ; but — reversing the common rule of life — 
he preached none of the virtues that he prac- 
tised. His pathetic attempts to adjust his tales 
to the established conventions of society failed 
signally of their purpose. Even Byron wrote 
him that little AUegra (as yet unfamiliar with 
her alphabet) should not be permitted to read 
" Lalla Rookh "; partly because it was n't pro- 
per, and partly — which was prettily said — 
lest she should discover "that there was a 



38 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

better poet than Papa." It was reserved for 
Moore's followers to present their verses and 
stories in the chastened form acceptable to 
English drawing-rooms, and permitted to Eng- 
lish youth. " La Belle Assemblee " published in 
1819 an Eastern tale called " Jahia and Mei- 
moune," in which the lovers converse like the 
virtuous characters in " Camilla." Jahia be- 
comes the guest of an infamous sheik, who in- 
toxicates him with a sherbet composed of " sugar, 
musk, and amber," and presents him with five 
thousand sequins and a beautiful Circassian 
slave. When he is left alone with this damsel, 
she addresses him thus : " I feel interested in 
you, and present circumstances will save me 
from the charge of imiiLodesty, when I say 
that I also love you. This love inspires me 
with fresh horror at the crimes that are here 
committed." 

Jahia protests that he respectfully returns 
her passion, and that his intentions are of an 
honourable character, whereupon the circum- 
spect maiden rejoins : " Since such are your 
sentiments, I will perish with you if I fail in 
delivering you"; and conducts him, through a 



i 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 39 

tangle of adventures, to safety. Jahia then 
places Meimoune under the chaperonage of 
his mother until their wedding day; after 
which we are happy to know that " they passed 
their lives in the enjoyment of every comfort 
attending on domestic felicity. If their lot was 
not splendid or magnificent, they were rich ill 
mutual affection; and they experienced that 
fortunate medium which, far removed from 
indigence, aspires not to the accumulation of 
immense wealth, and laughs at the unenvied 
load of pomp and splendour, which it neither 
seeks, nor desires to obtain." 

It is to be hoped that many obdurate hearts 
were softened, and many erroneous notions 
were set right by the influence of a story like 
this. In the " Monthly Museum " an endless 
narrative poem, " AbdaUah," stretched its slow 
length along from number to number, bloom- 
ing with fresh moral sentiments on every page ; 
while from an arid wilderness of Moorish 
love songs, and Persian love songs, and Cir- 
cassian love songs, and Hindu love songs, I 
quote this " Arabian " love song, peerless amid 
its peers : — 



40 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

Thy hair is black as the starless sky, 

And clasps thy neck as it loved its home ; 
Yet it moves at the soimd of thy faintest sigh, 
I Like the snake that lies on the white sea-foam. 

1 love thee, Ibla. Thou art bright 

As the white snow on the hills afar ; 
Thy face is sweet as the moon by night, 

And thine eye like the clear and rolling star. 

But the snow is poor and withers soon. 
While thou art firm and rich in hope ; 

And never (like thine) from the face of the moon 
Flamed the dark eye of the antelope. 

The truth and accuracy of this last observa- 
tion should commend the poem to all lovers of 
nature. 

It is the custom in these days of morbid ac- 
curacy to laugh at the second-hand knowledge 
which Moore so proudly and so innocently dis- 
played. Even Mr. Saintsbury says some unkind 
things about the notes to "Lalla Rookh," — 
scraps of twentieth-hand knowledge, he calls 
them, — while pleasantly recording his affection 
for the poem itself, an affection based upon the 
reasonable ground of childish recollections. In 
the well-ordered home of his infancy, none but 
" Sunday books " might be read on Sundays 
in nursery or schoolroom. " But this severity 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 41 

was tempered by one of those easements often 
occurring in a world, which, if not the best, is 
certainly not the worst of all possible worlds. 
For the convenience of servants, or for some 
other reason, the children were much more 
in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any 
other day ; and it was an unwritten rule that 
any book that lived in the drawing-room was 
fit Sunday reading. The consequence was that 
from the time I could read until childish things 
were put away, I used to spend a considerable 
part of the first day of the week in reading and 
re-reading a collection of books, four of which 
were Scott's poems, *Lalla Rookh,' 'The Es- 
says of Elia,' and Southey's ' Doctor.' There- 
fore it may be that I rank ' Lalla Kookh ' too 
high." 

Blessed memories, and thrice blessed influ- 
ences of childhood! But if "Lalla Eookh," 
like " Vathek," was written to be the joy of 
imaginative little boys and girls (alas for those 
who now replace it with " Allan in Alaska," 
and " Little Cora on the Continent"), the notes 
to " Lalla Rookh " were, to my infant mind, 
even more enthralling than the poem. There 



42 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

was a sketchiness about them, a detacliment 
from time and circumstance — I always hated 
being told the whole of everything — which 
led me day after day into fresh fields of con- 
jecture. The nymph who was encircled by a 
rainbow, and bore a radiant son ; the scimitars 
that were so dazzling they made the warriors 
wink ; the sacred well which reflected the moon 
at midday ; and the great embassy that was 
sent " from some port of the Indies " — a wel- 
come vagueness of geography — to recover a 
monkey's tooth, snatched away by some equally 
nameless conqueror ; — what child could fail to 
love such floating stars of erudition ? 

Our great-grandfathers were profoundly 
impressed by Moore's text-book acquirements. 
The "Monthly Keview" quoted a solid page 
of the notes to dazzle British readers, who con- 
fessed themselves amazed to find a fellow coun- 
tryman so much "at home" in Persia and 
Arabia. Blackwood authoritatively announced 
that Moore was familiar, not only " with the 
grandest regions of the human soul," — which 
is expected of a poet, — but also with the 
remotest boundaries of the East; and that in 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 43 

every tone and hue and form he was "purely 
and intensely Asiatic." '^ The carping criticism 
of paltry tastes and hmited understandings 
faded before that burst of admiration with 
which all enlightened spirits hailed the beauty 
and magnificence of ' Lalla Kookh.' " 

Few people care to confess to "paltry tastes " 
and " limited understandings." They would 
rather join in any general acclamation. " Brown- 
ing's poetry obscure! " I once heard a lecturer 
say with scorn. " Let us ask ourselves, ' Obscure 
to whom? ' No doubt a great many things are 
obscure to long-tailed Brazilian apes." After 
which his audience, with one accord, admitted 
that it understood " Sordello." So when Jeffrey 
— great umpire of games whose rules he never 
knew — informed the British public that there 
was not in " Lalla Eookh" " a simile, a descrip- 
tion, a name, a trait of history, or allusion of 
romance that does not indicate entire familiar- 
ity with the life, nature, and learning of the 
East," the public contentedly took his word 
for it. When he remarked that " the dazzling 
splendours, the breathing odours" of Araby 
were without doubt Moore's " native element," 



44 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

the public, whose native element was neither 
splendid nor sweet-smelling, envied the Irish- 
man his softer joys. " Lalla Eookh " might be 
" voluptuous " (a word we find in every review 
of the period), but its orientalism was beyond 
dispute. Did not Mrs. Skinner tell Moore that 
she had, when in India, translated the prose 
interludes into Bengali, for the benefit of her 
moonshee, and that the man was amazed at the 
accuracy of the costumes ? Did not the nephew 
of the Persian ambassador in Paris teU Mr. 
Stretch, who told Moore, that "Lalla Rookh" 
had been translated into Persian; that the 
songs — particularly " Bendemeer's Stream " 
— were sung " everyv\^here " ; and that the 
happy natives could hardly believe the whole 
work had not been taken originally from a 
Persian manuscript ? 

I 'm told, dear Moore, your lays are sung 
(Can it be true, you lucky man ?) 

By moonlight, in the Persian tongue, 
Along the streets of Ispahan. 

And not of Ispahan only ; for in the winter 
of 1821 the Berlin court presented "Lalla 
Rookh " with such splendour, such wealth of 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 45 

detail, and such titled actors, that Moore's 
heart was melted and his head was turned (as 
any other heart would have been melted, and 
any other head would have been turned) by 
the reports thereof. A Grand Duchess of Rus- 
sia took the part of Lalla Rookh; the Duke of 
Cumberland was Aurungzebe ; and a beautiful 
young sister of Prince Radzivil enchanted all 
beholders as the Peri. "Nothing else was 
talked about in Berlin " (it must have been a 
limited conversation) ; the King of Prussia had 
a set of engravings made of the noble actors in 
their costumes; and the Crown Prince sent 
word to Moore that he slept always with a copy 
of " Lalla Rookh " under his pillow, which was 
foolish, but flattering. Hardly had the echoes 
of this royal fete died away, when Spontini 
brought out in Berlin his opera " The Feast 
of Roses," and Moore's triumph in Prussia 
was complete. Byron, infinitely amused at the 
success of his own good advice, wrote to the 
happy poet: " Your Berlin drama is an honour 
unknown since the days of Elkanah Settle, 
whose 'Empress of Morocco' was presented 
by the court ladies, which was, as Johnson re- 



46 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

marks, ' the last blast of inflammation to poor 
Dryden.' " 

Who shall say that this comparison is with- 
out its dash of malice ? There is a natural limit 
to the success we wish our friends, even when 
we have spurred them on their way. 

If the English court did not lend itself with 
much gayety or grace to dramatic entertain- 
ments, English society was quick to respond to 
the delights of a modified orientalism. That is 
to say, it sang melting songs about bulbuls and 
Shiraz wine ; wore ravishing Turkish costumes 
whenever it had a chance (like the beautiful 
Mrs. Winkworth in the charades at Gaunt 
House); and covered its locks — if they were 
feminine locks — with turbans of portentous 
size and splendour. When Mrs. Fitzherbert, 
aged seventy-three, gave a fancy dress ball, so 
many of her guests appeared as Turks, and 
Georgians, and sultanas, that it was hard to 
believe that Brighton, and not Stamboul, was 
the scene of the festivity. At an earlier enter- 
tainment, " a rural breakfast and promenade," 
given by Mrs. Hobart at her villa near Fulham, 
and " graced by the presence of royalty," the 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 47 

leading attraction was Mrs. Bristow, who re- 
presented Queen Nourjahad in the " Garden 
of Roses." " Draped in all the magnificence of 
Eastern grandeur, Mrs. Bristow was seated in 
the larger drawing-room (which was very beau- 
tifully fitted up with cushions in the Indian 
style), smoking her hookah amidst all sorts of 
the choicest perfumes. Mrs. Bristow was very 
profuse with otto of roses, drops of which were 
thrown about the ladies' dresses. The whole 
house was scented with the delicious fragrance." 
The " European Magazine," the " Monthly 
Museum," all the dim old periodicals published 
in the early part of the last century for femi- 
nine readers, teem with such " society notes." 
From them, too, we learn that by 1823 turbans 
of " rainbow striped gauze frosted with gold " 
were in universal demand ; while " black velvet 
turbans, enormously large, and worn very much 
on one side," must have given a rakish appear- 
ance to stout British matrons. " La Belle As- 
semblee " describes for us with tender enthusi- 
asm a ravishing turban, " in the Turkish style," 
worn in the winter of 1823 at the theatre and 
at evening parties. This masterpiece was of 



48 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

"pink oriental crepe, beautifully folded in 
front, and richly ornamented with pearls. The 
folds are fastened on the left side, just above 
the ear, with a Turkish scimitar of pearls ; and 
on the right side are tassels of pearls, sur- 
mounted by a crescent and a star.'* 

Here we have Lady Jane or Lady Amelia 
transformed at once into young Nourmahal ; 
and, to aid the illusion, a " Circassian corset '* 
was devised, free from encroaching steel or 
whalebone, and warranted to give its English 
wearers the " flowing and luxurious lines " ad- 
mired in the overfed inmates of the harem. 
When the passion for orientalism began to sub- 
side in London, remote rural districts caught 
and prolonged the infection. I have sympa- 
thized all my life with the innocent ambition 
of Miss Matty Jenkyns to possess a sea-green 
turban, like the one worn by Queen Adelaide ; 
and have never been able to forgive that ruth- 
lessly sensible Mary Smith — the chronicler of 
Cranf ord — for taking her a " neat middle-aged 
cap *' instead. " I was most particularly anxious 
to prevent her from disfiguring her small gentle 
mousy face with a great Saracen's head tur- 



WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 49 

ban," says the judicious Miss Smith with 
a smirk of self -commendation ; and poor Miss 
Matty — the cap being bought — has to bow 
to this arbiter of fate. How much we all suiSer 
in life from the discretion of our families and 
friends ! 

Thackeray laughed the dim ghost of " LaUa 
Rookh " out of England. He mocked at the 
turbans, and at the old ladies who wore them ; 
at the vapid love songs, and at the young ladies 
who sang them. 

I am a little brown bulbul. Come and listen in the moon- 
light. Praise be to Allah ! I am a merry bard. 

He derided the " breathing odours of Araby,'* 
and the Eastern travellers who imported this 
exotic atmosphere into Grosvenor Square. 
Yonng Bedwin Sands, who has " lived under 
tents," who has published a quarto, ornamented 
with his own portrait in various oriental cos- 
tumes, and who goes about accompanied by a 
black servant of most unprepossessing appear- 
ance, " just like another Brian de Bois Guil- 
bert," is only a degree less ridiculous than 
Clarence Bulbul, who gives Miss Tokely a piece 
of the sack in which an indiscreet Zuleika was 



50 WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 

drowned, and whose servant says to callers : 
" Mon maitre est au divan," or " Monsieur trou- 
vera Monsieur dans son serail. . . . He has 
coffee and pipes for everybody. I should like 
you to have seen the face of old Bowly, his 
college tutor, called upon to sit cross-legged 
on a divan, a little cup of bitter black mocha 
put into his hand, and a large amber-muzzled 
pipe stuck into his mouth before he could say 
it was a fine day. Bowly almost thought he had 
compromised his principles by consenting so far 
to this Turkish manner." Bulbul's sure and 
simple method of commending himself to young 
ladies is by telling them they remind him of a 
girl he knew in Circassia, — Ameena, the sister 
of Schamyle Bey. " Do you know. Miss Pim,'* 
he thoughtfully observes, " that you would fetch 
twenty thousand piastres in the market at Con- 
stantinople ? " Whereupon Miss Pim is filled 
with embarrassed elation. An English girl, con- 
scious of being in no great demand at home, was 
naturally flattered as well as fluttered by the 
thought of having market value elsewhere. And 
perhaps this feminine instinct was at the root of 
"Lalla Hookh's" long popularity in England. 



THE CORRESPONDENT 

Correspondences are like small-clothes before the inven- 
tion of suspenders ; it is impossible to keep them up. — 
Sydney Smith to Mks. Crowe. 

In this lamentable admission, in this blunt and 
revolutionary sentiment, we hear the first clear 
striking of a modern note, the first gasping pro- 
test against the limitless demands of letter-writ- 
ing. When Sydney Smith was a little boy, it 
was not impossible to keep a correspondence 
up ; it was impossible to let it go. He was ten 
years old when Sir William Pepys copied out 
long portions of Mrs. Montagu's letters, and 
left them as a legacy to his heirs. He was 
twelve years old when Miss Anna Seward — 
the " Swan of Lichfield " — copied thirteen 
pages of description which the Rev. Thomas 
Sedgwick WhaUey had written her from Swit- 
zerland, and sent them to her friend, Mr. Wil- 
liam Hayley. She called this " snatching him 
to the Continent by WhaUey an magic." What 
Mr. Hayley called it we do not know ; but he 



62 THE CORRESPONDENT 

had his revenge, for the impartial " Swan " 
copied eight verses of an "impromptu" which 
Mr. Hayley had written upon her, and sent 
them in turn to Mr. Whalley ; — thus making 
each friend a scourge to the other, and widen- 
ing the network of correspondence which had 
enmeshed the world. 

It is impossible not to feel a trifle envious of 
Mr. Whalley, who looms before us as the most 
petted and accomplished of clerical bores, of 
"literary and chess-playing divines." He was 
but twenty-six when the kind-hearted Bishop 
of Ely presented him with the living of Hag- 
worthingham, stipulating that he should not 
take up his residence there, — the neighbour- 
hood of the Lincolnshire fens being considered 
an unhealthy one. Mr. Whalley cheerfully com- 
plied with this condition ; and for fifty years 
the duties were discharged by curates, who 
could not afford good health ; while the rector 
spent his winters in Europe, and his summers 
at Mendip Lodge. He was of an amorous dis- 
position, — "sentimentally pathetic," Miss Bur- 
ney calls him, — and married three times, two 
of his wives being women of fortune. He lived 



THE CORRESPONDENT 53 

in good society, and beyond his means, like a 
gentleman; was painted by Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds (who has very delicately and maliciously 
accentuated his resemblance to the tiny spaniel 
he holds in his arms) ; and died of old age, in 
the comfortable assurance that he had lost 
nothing the world could give. A voluminous 
correspondence — afterwards published in two 
volumes — afforded scope for that clerical dif- 
f useness which should have found its legitimate 
outlet in the Hagworthingham pulpit. 

The Rev. Augustus Jessup has recorded a 
passionate admiration for Cicero's letters, on 
the ground that they never describe scenery; 
but Mr. Whalley's letters seldom do anything 
else. He wrote to Miss Sophia Weston a de- 
scription of Vaucluse, which fills three closely 
printed pages. Miss Weston copied every word, 
and sent it to Miss Seward, who copied every 
word of her copy, and sent it to the long-suf- 
fering Mr. Hayley, with the remark that Mr. 
Whalley and Petrarch were " kindred spirits." 
Later on this kinship was made pleasantly man- 
ifest by the publication of " Edwy and Edilda," 
which is described as a " domestic epic," and 



64 THE CORRESPONDENT 

which Mr. Whalley's friends considered to be 
a moral bulwark as well as an epoch-making 
poem. Indeed, we find Miss Seward imploring 
him to republish it, on the extraordinary ground 
that it will add to his happiness in heaven to 
know that the fruits of his industry " continue 
to inspire virtuous pleasure through passing 
generations." It is animating to contemplate 
the celestial choirs congratulating the angel 
Whalley at intervals on the "virtuous pleasure " 
inspired by "Edwy and Edilda." "This," says 
Mr. Kenwigs, " is an ewent at which Evin it- 
self looks down." 

There was no escape from the letter-writer 
who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five 
years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. 
It would have been as easy to shake off an oc- 
topus or a boa-constrictor. Miss Seward opened 
her attack upon Sir Walter Scott, whom she 
had never seen, with a long and passionate let- 
ter, lamenting the death of a friend whom Scott 
had never seen. She conjured him not to an- 
swer this letter, because she was " dead to the 
world." Scott gladly obeyed, content that the 
lady should be at least dead to him, which was 



THE CORRESPONDENT 55 

the last possibility she contemplated. Before 
twelve months were out they were in brisk cor- 
respondence, an acquaintance was established, 
and when she died in earnest, some years later, 
he found himself one of her literary executors, 
and twelve quarto manuscript volumes of her 
letters waiting to be published. These Scott 
wisely refused to touch; but he edited her 
poems, — a task he much disliked, — wrote the 
epitaph on her monument in Lichfield Cathe- 
dral, and kindly maintained that, although her 
sentimentality appalled him, and her enthusi- 
asm chilled his soul, she was a talented and 
pleasing person. 

The most formidable thing about the letters 
of this period — apart from their length — is 
their eloquence. It bubbles and seethes over 
every page. Miss Seward, writing to Mrs. 
Knowles in 1789 upon the dawning of the 
French Revolution, of which she understood no 
more than a canary, pipes an ecstatic trill. " So 
France has dipped her lilies in the living stream 
of American freedom, and bids her sons be 
slaves no longer. In such a contest the vital 
sluices must be wastef uUy opened ; but few Eng- 



56 THE CORRESPONDENT 

lish hearts I hope there are that do not wish 
victory may sit upon the swords that freedom 
has unsheathed." It sounds so exactly like the 
Americans in " Martin Chuzzlewit " that one 
doubts whether Mr. Jefferson Brick or the 
Honourable Elijah Pogram really uttered the 
sentiment ; while surely to Mrs. Hominy, and 
not to the Lichfield Swan, must be credited 
this beautiful passage about a middle-aged but 
newly married couple ; " The berries of holly, 
with which Hymen formed that garland, blush 
through the snows of time, and dispute the prize 
of happiness with the roses of youth ; — and 
they are certainly less subject to the blights of 
expectation and palling fancy." 

It is hard to conceive of a time when letters 
like these were sacredly treasured by the re- 
cipients (our best friend, the waste-paper bas- 
ket, seems to have been then unknown); when 
the writers thereof bequeathed them as a legacy 
to the world; and when the public — being 
under no compulsion — bought six volumes of 
them as a contribution to English literature. 
It is hard to think of a girl of twenty-one writ- 
ing to an intimate friend as Elizabeth Robinson, 



THE CORRESPONDENT 57 

afterwards the " great " Mrs. Montagu, wrote 
to the young Duchess of Portland, who appears 
to have ventured upon a hope that they were 
having a mild winter in Kent. 

" I am obliged to your Grace for your good 
wishes of fair weather; sunshine gilds every 
object, but, alas ! December is but cloudy wea- 
ther, how few seasons boast many days of calm ! 
April, which is the blooming youth of the year, 
is as famous for hasty showers as for gentle sun- 
shine. May, June, and July have too much heat 
and violence, the Autumn withers the Summer's 
gayety, and in the Winter the hopeful blossoms 
of Spring and fair fruits of Summer are de- 
cayed, and storms and clouds arise." 

After these obvious truths, for which the 
almanac stands responsible. Miss Robinson pro- 
ceeds to compare human life to the changing 
year, winding up at the close of a dozen pages : 
" Happy and worthy are those few whose youth 
is not impetuous, nor their age sullen; they 
indeed should be esteemed, and their happy 
influence courted." 

Twenty-one, and ripe for moral platitudes ! 
What wonder that we find the same lady, when 



68 THE CORRESPONDENT 

crowned with years and honours, writing to the 
son of her friend, Lord Lyttelton, a remorse- 
lessly long letter of precept and good counsel, 
which that young gentleman (being afterwards 
known as the wicked Lord Lyttelton) seems 
never to have taken to heart. 

" The morning of life, like the morning of 
the day, should be dedicated to business. Give it 
therefore, dear Mr. Lyttelton, to strenuous ex- 
ertion and labour of mind, before the indolence 
of the meridian hour, or the unabated fervour 
of the exhausted day, renders you unfit for 
severe application." 

" Unabated fervour of the exhausted day " 
is a phrase to be commended. We remember 
with awe that Mrs. Montagu was the brightest 
star in the chaste firmament of female intel- 
lect ; — " the first woman for literary knowledge 
in England," wrote Mrs. Thrale; "and, if in 
England, I hope I may say in the world." We 
hope so, indeed. None but a libertine would 
doubt it. And no one less contumelious than 
Dr. Johnson ever questioned Mrs. Montagu's 
supremacy. She was, according to her great- 
grandniece. Miss Climenson, " adored by men," 



THE CORRESPONDENT 69 

while " purest of the pure " ; which was equally 
pleasant for herself and for Mr. Montagu. 
She wrote more letters, with fewer punctua- 
tion marks, than any Englishwoman of her 
day ; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, 
nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two 
volumes of undated correspondence which were 
printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, 
after which the gallant Baron either died at his 
post or was smitten with despair ; for sixty- 
eight cases of letters lay undisturbed for the 
best part of a century, when they passed into 
Miss Climenson's hands. This intrepid lady 
received them — so she says — with " un- 
bounded joy " ; and has already published two 
fat volumes, with the promise of several others 
in the near future. " Les morts n'ecrivent 
point," said Madame de Maintenon hope- 
fully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, 
when we still continue to receive their letters ? 
Miss Elizabeth Carter, called by courtesy 
Mrs. Carter, was the most vigorous of Mrs. 
Montagu's correspondents. Although a lady 
of learning, who read Greek and had dipped 
into Hebrew, she was far too " humble and 



60 THE CORRESPONDENT 

unambitious " to claim an acquaintance with 
the exalted mistress of Montagu House; but 
that patroness of literature treated her with 
such true condescension that they were soon 
on the happiest terms. When Mrs. Montagu 
writes to Miss Carter that she has seen the 
splendid coronation of George III, Miss Carter 
hastens to remind her that such splendour is 
for majesty alone. 

" High rank and power require every exter- 
nal aid of pomp and eclat that may awe and 
astonish spectators by the ideas of the mag- 
nificent and sublime ; while the ornaments of 
more equal conditions should be adapted to the 
quiet tenour of general life, and be content to 
charm and engage by the gentler graces of the 
beautiful and pleasing." 

Mrs. Montagu was fond of display. All her 
friends admitted, and some deplored the fact. 
But surely there was no likelihood of her ap- 
propriating the coronation services as a feature 
for the entertainments at Portman Square. 

Advice, however, was the order of the day. 
As the excellent Mrs. Chapone wrote to Sir 
William Pepys: " It is a dangerous commerce 



THE CORRESPONDENT 61 

for friends to praise eacli other's Virtues, in- 
stead of reminding each other of duties and 
of failings." Yet a too robust candour carried 
perils of its own, for Miss Seward having 
written to her " beloved Sophia Weston " with 
" an ingenuousness which I thought necessary 
for her weKare, but which her high spirits 
would not brook," Sophia was so unaffectedly- 
angry that twelve years of soothing silence 
followed. 

Another wonderful thing about the letter- 
writers, especially the female letter-writers, of 
this engaging period is the wealth of hyperbole 
in which they rioted. Nothing is told in plain 
terms. Tropes, metaphors, and similes adorn 
every page; and the supreme elegance of the 
language is rivalled only by the elusiveness of 
the idea, which is lost in an eddy of words. 
Marriage is always alluded to as the " hymeneal 
torch," or the " hymeneal chain," or " hymen- 
eal emancipation from parental care." Birds 
are " feathered muses," and a heart is a " vital 
urn." When Mrs. Montagu writes to Mr. Gil- 
bert West, that " miracle of the Moral World," 
to condole with him on his gout, she laments 



62 THE CORRESPONDENT 

that his " writing hand, first dedicated to the 
Muses, then with maturer judgment conse- 
crated to the Nymphs of Solyma, should be 
led captive by the cruel foe." If Mr. West 
chanced not to know who or what the Nymphs 
of Solyma were, he had the intelligent pleasure 
of finding out. Miss Seward describes Mrs. 
Tighe's sprightly charms as " Aonian inspira- 
tion added to the cestus of Venus " ; and speaks 
of the elderly " ladies of Llangollen " as, " in 
all but the voluptuous sense, Armidas of its 
bowers." Duelling is to her " the murderous 
punctilio of Luciferian honour." A Scotch 
gentleman who writes verse is " a Cambrian 
Orpheus " ; a Lichfield gentleman who sketches 
is "our Lichfield Claude"; and a budding 
clerical writer is "our young sacerdotal Mar- 
cellus." When the " Swan " wished to apprise 
Scott of Dr. Darwin's death, it never occurred 
to her to write, as we in this dull age should 
do: "Dr. Darwin died last night," or, "Poor 
Dr. Darwin died last night." She wrote: " A 
bright luminary in this neighbourhood recently 
shot from his sphere with awful and deplor- 
able suddenness"; — thus pricking Sir W^al- 



THE CORRESPONDENT 63 

ter's imagination to the wonder point before 
descending to facts. Even tlie rain and snow 
were never spoken of in the plain language 
of the Weather Bureau ; and the elements had 
a set of allegories aU their own. Miss Carter 
would have scorned to take a walk by the sea. 
She " chased the ebbing Neptune." Mrs. Cha- 
pone was not blown by the wind. She was 
" buffeted by Eolus and his sons." Miss Seward 
does not hope that Mr. Whalley's rheumatism 
is better; but that he has overcome " the mal- 
influence of marine damps, and the monoton- 
ous murmuring of boundless waters." Perhaps 
the most triumphant instance on record of sus- 
tained metaphor is Madame d'Arblay's account 
of Mrs. Montagu's yearly dinner to the London 
chimney-sweeps, in which the word sweep is 
never once used, so that the editor was actually 
compelled to add a footnote to explain what 
the lady meant. The boys are " jetty objects," 
" degraded outcasts from society," and " sooty 
little agents of our most blessed luxury." They 
are " hapless artificers who perform the most 
abject offices of any authorized calling " ; they 
are " active guardians of our blazing hearth "; 



64 THE CORRESPONDENT 

but plain cliimney-sweeps, never! Madame 
d'Arblay would have perished at the stake 
before using so vulgar and obvious a term. 

How was this mass of correspondence pre- 
served? How did it happen that the letters 
were never torn up, or made into spills, — the 
common fate of all such missives when I was a 
little girl. Granted that Miss Carter treasured 
Mrs. Montagu's letters (she declared fervidly 
she could never be so barbarous as to destroy 
one), and that Mrs. Montagu treasured Miss 
Carter's. Granted that Miss Weston treasured 
Mr. Whalley's, and that Mr. Whalley treas- 
ured Miss Weston's. Granted that Miss Sew- 
ard provided against all contingencies by copy- 
ing her own letters into fat blank books before 
they were mailed, elaborating her spineless 
sentences, and omitting everything she deemed 
too trivial or too domestic for the public ear. 
But is it likely that young Lyttelton at Ox- 
ford laid sacredly away Mrs. Montagu's pages 
of good counsel, or that young Franks at Cam- 
bridge preserved the ponderous dissertations of 
Sir William Pepys? Sir William was a Baro- 
net, a Master in Chancery, and — unlike his 



THE CORRESPONDENT 66 

famous ancestor — a most respectable and ex- 
emplary gentleman. His innocent ambition was 
to be on terms of intimacy with the literary 
lights of his day. He knew and ardently ad- 
mired Dr. Johnson, who in return detested him 
cordially. He knew and revered, " in unison 
with the rest of the world," Miss Hannah More. 
He corresponded at great length with lesser 
lights, — with Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Hart- 
ley, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. He wrote 
endless commentaries on Homer and Virgil to 
young Franks, and reams of good advice to his 
little son at Eton. There is something pathetic 
in his regret that the limitations of life will not 
permit him to be as verbose as he would like. 
" I could write for an hour," he assures poor 
Franks, " upon that most delightful of all pas- 
sages, the Lion deprived of its Young ; but the 
few minutes one can catch amidst the Noise, 
hurry and confusion of an Assize town will not 
admit of any Classical discussions. But was I 
in the calm retirement of your Study at Acton, 
I have much to say to you, to which I can only 
aUude." 

The publication of scores and scores of such 



66 THE CORRESPONDENT 

letters, all written to one unresponsive young 
man at Cambridge (who is repeatedly reproached 
for not answering them), makes us wonder 
afresh who kept the correspondence ; and the 
problem is deepened by the appearance of Sir 
William's letters to his son. This is the way 
the first one begins : — 

" My dear Boy, — I cannot let a Post es- 
cape me without giving you the Pleasure of 
knowing how much you have gladdened the 
Hearts of two as affectionate Parents as ever 
lived ; when you tell us that the Principles of 
Religion begin already to exert their efficacy 
in making you look down with contempt on the 
wretched grovelling Vices with which you are 
surrounded, you make the most delightful Re- 
turn you can ever make for our Parental Care 
and Affection ; you make Us at Peace with 
Ourselves; and enable us to hope that our 
dear Boy will Persevere in that Path which wiR 
ensure the greatest Share of Comfort here, and 
a certainty of everlasting Happiness hereafter." 

I am disposed to think that Sir WiUiam 
made a fair copy of this letter and of others 



THE CORRESPONDENT 67 

like it, and laid them aside as models of pa- 
rental exhortation. Whether young Pepys was 
a little prig, or a particularly accomplished little 
scamp (and both possibilities are open to consid- 
eration), it seems equally unlikely that an Eton 
boy's desk would have proved a safe repository 
for such ample and admirable discourses. 

The publication of Cowper's letters in 1803 
and 1804 struck a chill into the hearts of ac- 
complished and erudite correspondents. Poor 
Miss Seward never rallied from the shock of 
their " commonness," and of their popularity. 
Here was a man who wrote about beggars and 
postmen, about cats and kittens, about buttered 
toast and the kitchen table. Here was a man 
who actually looked at things before he de- 
scribed them (which was a startling innova- 
tion) ; who called the wind the wind, and but- 
tercups buttercups, and a hedgehog a hedgehog. 
Miss Seward honestly despised Cowper's letters. 
She said they were without " imagination or 
eloquence," without "discriminative criticism," 
without " characteristic investigation." Investi- 
gating the relations between the family cat and 
an intrusive viper was, from her point of view, 



68 THE CORRESPONDENT 

unworthy the dignity of an author. Cowper's 
love of detail, his terrestrial turn of mind, his 
humour, and his veracity were disconcerting 
in an artificial age. When Miss Carter took a 
country walk, she did not stoop to observe the 
trivial things she saw. Apparently she never 
saw anything. What she described were the 
sentiments and emotions awakened in her by a 
featureless principle called Nature. Even the 
ocean — which is too big to be overlooked — 
started her on a train of moral reflections, i» 
which she passed easily from the grandeur of the 
elements to the brevity of life, and the paltri- 
ness of earthly ambitions. " How vast are the 
capacities of the soul, and how little and con- 
temptible its aims and pursuits." With this 
original remark, the editor of the letters (a 
nephew and a clergyman) was so delighted that 
he added a pious comment of his own. 

" If such be the case, how strong and conclu- 
sive is the argument deduced from it, that the 
soul must be destined to another state more 
suitable to its views and powers. It is much to 
be lamented that Mrs. Carter did not pursue 
this line of thought any further.'* 



THE CORRESPONDENT 69 

People who bought nine volumes of a corre- 
spondence like this were expected, as the editor 
warns them, to derive from it " moral, literary, 
and religious improvement." It was in every 
way worthy of a lady who had translated Epic- 
tetus, and who had the " great " Mrs. Montagu 
for a friend. But, as Miss Seward pathetically 
remarked, " any well-educated person, with 
talents not above the common level, produces 
every day letters as well worth attention as 
most of Cowper's, especially as to diction." 
The perverseness of the public in bujdng, in 
reading, in praising these letters, iSlled her with 
pained bewilderment. Not even the writer's 
sincere and sad piety, his tendency to moralize, 
and the transparent innocence of his life could 
reconcile her to plain transcripts from nature, 
or to such an unaffecting incident as this : — 

" A neighbour of mine in Silver End keeps 
an ass ; the ass lives on the other side of the 
garden wall, and I am writing in the green- 
house. It happens that he is this morning most 
musically disposed ; either cheered by the fine 
weather, or by some new tune which he has 
just acquired, or by finding his voice more har- 



70 THE CORRESPONDENT 

monious than usual. It would be cruel to mor- 
tify so fine a singer, therefore I do not tell him 
that he interrupts and hinders me ; but I ven- 
ture to tell you so, and to plead his perform- 
ance in excuse of my abrupt conclusion." 

Here is not only the " common " diction 
which Miss Seward condemned, but a very com- 
mon casualty, which she would have naturally 
deemed beneath notice. Cowper wrote a great 
deal about animals, and always with fine and 
humorous appreciation. He sought relief from 
the hidden torment of his soul in the contem- 
plation of creatures who fill their place in life 
without morals, and without misgivings. We 
know what safe companions they were for him 
when we read his account of his hares, of his 
kitten dancing on her hind legs, — " an exer- 
cise which she performs with all the grace 
imaginable," — and of his goldfinches amor- 
ously kissing each other between the cage wires. 
When Miss Seward bent her mind to "the 
lower orders of creation," she did not describe 
them at all; she gave them the benefit of that 
"discriminative criticism" which she felt that 
Cowper lacked. Here, for example, is her 



THE CORRESPONDENT 71 

thouglitful analysis of man's loyal servitor, the 
dog: — 

" That a dog is a noble, grateful, faithful 
animal we must all be conscious, and deserves 
a portion of man's tenderness and care ; — yet, 
from its utter incapacity of more than glimpses 
of rationality, there is a degree of insanity, as 
well as of impoliteness to his acquaintance, and 
of unkindness to his friends, in lavishing so 
much more of his attention in the first instance, 
and of affection in the latter, upon it than 
upon them." 

It sounds like a parody on a great living 
master of complex prose. By its side, Cowper's 
description of Beau is certainly open to the 
reproach of plainness. 

" My dog is a spaniel. Till Miss Gunning 
begged him, he was the property of a farmer, 
and had been accustomed to lie in the chimney 
corner among the embers till the hair was 
singed from his back, and nothing was left of 
his tail but the gristle. Allowing for these 
disadvantages, he is really handsome; and 
when nature shall have furnished him with 
a new coat, a gift which, in consideration of 



72 THE CORRESPONDENT 

the ragged condition of his old one, it is hoped 
she will not long delay, he will then be unri- 
valled in personal endowments by any dog in 
this country." 

No wonder the Lichfield Swan was daunted 
by the inconceivable popularity of such letters. 
No wonder Miss Hannah More preferred Aken- 
side to Cowper. What had these eloquent 
ladies to do with quiet observation, with sober 
felicity of phrase, with " the style of honest 
men"! 



THE NOVELIST 

Soft Sensibility, sweet Beauty's soul ! 
Keeps her coy state, and animates the whole. 

Hayley. 

Readers of Miss Burney's Diary will remem- 
ber her maidenly confusion when Colonel Fairly 
(the Honourable Stephen Digby) recommends 
to her a novel called " Original Love-Letters 
between a Lady of Quality and a Person of In- 
ferior Station." The authoress of "Evelina" 
and " Cecilia " — then thirty-six years of age — 
is embarrassed by the glaring impropriety of 
this title. In vain Colonel Fairly assures her 
that the book contains " nothing but good sense, 
moral reflections, and refined ideas, clothed in 
the most expressive and elegant language." 
Fanny, though longing to read a work of such 
estimable character, cannot consent to borrow, 
or even discuss, anything so compromising as 
love-letters ; and, with her customary coyness, 
murmurs a few words of denial. Colonel Fairly, 
however, is not easily daunted. Three days later 



74 THE NOVELIST 

he actually brings the volume to that virginal 
bower, and asks permission to read portions of 
it aloud, excusing his audacity with the solemn 
assurance that there was no person, not even 
his own daughter, in whose hands he would 
hesitate to place it. " It was now impossible to 
avoid saying that I should like to hear it," 
confesses Miss Burney. " I should seem else to 
doubt either his taste or his delicacy, while I 
have the highest opinion of both." So the book 
is produced, and the fair listener, bending over 
her needlework to hide her blushes, acknow- 
ledges it to be "moral, elegant, feeling, and 
rational," while lamenting that the unhappy 
nature of its title makes its presence a source 
of embarrassment. 

This edifying little anecdote sheds light upon 
a palmy period of propriety. Miss Burney's 
self-consciousness, her superhuman diffidence, 
and the " delicious confusion " which over- 
whelmed her upon the most insignificant occa- 
sions, were beacon lights to her " sisters of Par- 
nassus," to the less distinguished women who 
followed her brilliant lead. The passion for 
novel-reading was asserting itself for the first 



THE NOVELIST 75 

time in the history of the world as a dominant 
note of femininity. The sentimentalities of fic- 
tion expanded to meet the woman's standard, to 
satisfy her irrational demands. " If the story- 
teller had always had mere men for an audi- 
ence," says an acute English critic, "there 
would have been no romance ; nothing but the 
improving fable, or the indecent anecdote." It 
was the woman who, as Miss Seward sorrow- 
fully observed, sucked the " sweet poison " 
which the novelist administered; it was the 
woman who stooped conspicuously to the "reign- 
ing folly " of the day. 

The particular occasion of this outbreak on 
Miss Seward's part was the extraordinary suc- 
cess of a novel, now long forgotten by the 
world, but which in its time rivalled in popu- 
larity " Evelina," and the well-loved " Mysteries 
of Udolpho." Its plaintive name is " Emmeline ; 
or the Orphan of the Castle," and its authoress, 
Charlotte Smith, was a woman of courage, 
character, and good ability ; also of a cheerful 
temperament, which we should never have sur- 
mised from her works. It is said that her son 
owed his advancement in the East India Com- 



76 THE NOVELIST 

pany solely to the admiration felt for " Emme- 
line," which was being read as assiduously in 
Bengal as in London. Sir Walter Scott, always 
the gentlest of critics, held that it belonged to 
the "highest branch of fictitious narrative." 
The Queen, who considered it a masterpiece, 
lent it to Miss Burney, who in turn gave it to 
Colonel Fairly, who ventured to observe that it 
was not "piquant," and asked for a "Rambler" 
instead. 

"Emmeline" is not piquant. Its heroine 
has more tears than Niobe. " Formed of the 
softest elements, and with a mind calculated for 
select friendship and domestic happiness," it is 
her misfortune to be loved by all the men she 
meets. The " interesting languor " of a coun- 
tenance habitually " wet with tears " proves 
their undoing. Her " deep convulsive sobs " 
charm them more than the laughter of other 
maidens. When the orphan leaves the castle 
for the first time, she weeps bitterly for an 
hour ; when she converses with her uncle, she 
can " no longer command her tears, sobs 
obliged her to cease speaking " ; and when he 
urges upon her the advantages of a worldly 



THE NOVELIST 77 

marriage, she — as if that were possible — 
"wept more than before." When Delamere, 
maddened by rejection, carries her off in a post- 
chaise (a delightful frontispiece illustrates this 
episode), " a shower of tears fell from her eyes " ; 
and even a rescue fails to raise her spirits. 
Her response to Godolphin's tenderest ap- 
proaches is to " wipe away the involuntary be- 
trayers of her emotion " ; and when he exclaims 
in a transport : " Enchanting softness ! Is then 
the safety of Godolphin so dear to that angelic 
bosom? " she answers him with "audible sobs." 
The other characters in the book are nearly 
as tearful. When Delamere is not striking his 
forehead with his clenched fist, he is weeping 
at Emmeline's feet. The repentant Fitz-Ed- 
ward lays his head on a chair, and weeps " like 
a woman." Lady Adelina, who has stooped to 
folly, naturally sheds many tears, and writes an 
" Ode to Despair " ; while Emmeline from time 
to time gives " vent to a full heart " by weeping 
over Lady Adelina's infant. Godolphin sobs 
loudly when he sees his frail sister ; and when 
he meets Lord Westhaven after an absence of 
four years, " the manly eyes of both brothers 



78 THE NOVELIST 

were filled with tears." We wonder how Scott, 
whose heroines cry so little and whose heroes 
never cry at all, stood all this weeping; and, 
when we remember the perfunctory nature of 
Sir Walter's love scenes, — wedged in any 
way among more important matters, — we won- 
der still more how he endured the ravings of 
Delamere, or the melancholy verses with which 
Godolphin from time to time soothes his de- 
spondent soul. 

In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind 
Will to the deaf cold elements complain ; 
And tell the embosomed grief, however vain, 

To sullen surges and the viewless wind. 

It was not, however, the mournfulness of 
" Emmeline " which displeased Miss Seward, 
but rather the occasional intrusion of "low 
characters " ; of those underbred and unimpas- 
sioned persons who — as in Miss Burney's and 
Miss Ferrier's novels — are naturally and al- 
most cheerfully vulgar. That Mr. William 
Hayley, author of " The Triumphs of Temper," 
and her own most ardent admirer, should tune 
his inconstant lyre in praise of Mrs. Smith was 
more than Miss Seward could bear. " My very 



THE NOVELIST 79 

foes acquit me of harbouring one grain of envy 
in my bosom," she writes him feelingly; "yet 
it is surely by no means inconsistent with that 
exemption to feel a little indignant, and to 
enter one's protest, when compositions of mere 
mediocrity are extolled far above those of real 
genius." She then proceeds to point out the 
" indelicacy " of Lady Adelina's fall from grace, 
and the use of " kitchen phrases," such as "she 
grew white at the intelligence." " White in- 
stead of pale," comments Miss Seward severely, 
" I have often heard servants say, but never a 
gentleman or a gentlewoman." If Mr. Hayley 
desires to read novels, she urges upon him the 
charms of another popular heroine, Caroline de 
Lichtfield, in whom he will find " simplicity, 
wit, pathos, and the most exalted generosity " ; 
and the history of whose adventures "makes 
curiosity gasp, admiration kindle, and pity dis- 
solve." 

Caroline, "the gay child of Artless Non- 
chalance," is at least a more cheerful young 
person than the Orphan. Her story, trans- 
lated from the French of Madame de Monto- 
lieu, was widely read in England and on the 



80 THE NOVELIST 

Continent ; and Miss Seward tells us that its 
author was indebted "to the merits and graces 
of these volumes for a transition from incom- 
petence to the comforts of wealth; from the 
unprotected dependence of waning virginity to 
the social pleasures of wedded friendship." In 
plain words, we are given to understand that 
a rich and elderly German widower read the 
book, sought an acquaintance with the writer, 
and married her. "Hymen," exclaims Miss 
Seward, "passed by the fane of Cytherea and 
the shrine of Plutus, to light his torch at the 
altar of genius"; — which beautiful burst of 
eloquence makes it painful to add the chilling 
truth, and say that "Caroline de Lichtfield" 
was written six years after its author's marriage 
with M. de Montolieu, who was a Swiss, and her 
second husband. She espoused her first, M. de 
Crousaz, when she was eighteen, and stiU com- 
fortably remote from the terrors of waning 
virginity. Accurate information was not, how- 
ever, a distinguishing characteristic of the day. 
Sir Walter Scott, writing some years later of 
Madame de Montolieu, ignores both marriages 
altogether, and calls her Mademoiselle. 



THE NOVELIST 81 

No rich reward lay in wait for poor Char- 
lotte Smith, whose husband was systematically 
impecunious, and whose large family of children 
were supported wholly by her pen. " Emme- 
line, or the Orphan of the Castle" was followed 
by " Ethelinda, or the Recluse of the Lake," and 
that by " The Old Manor House," which was 
esteemed her masterpiece. Its heroine bears the 
interesting name of Monimia; and when she 
marries her Orlando, " every subsequent hour 
of their lives was marked by some act of 
benevolence," — a breathless and philanthropic 
career. By this time the false-hearted Hayley 
had so far transferred to Mrs. Smith the hom- 
age due to Miss Seward that he was rewarded 
with the painful privilege of reading "The 
Old Manor House" in manuscript, — a privi- 
lege reserved in those days for tried and patient 
friends. The poet had himself dallied a little 
with fiction, having written, " solely to promote 
the interests of religion," a novel caUed "The 
Young Widow," which no one appears to have 
read, except perhaps the Archbishop of Can- 
terbury, to whom its author sent a copy. 

In purity of motive Mr. Hayley was rivalled 



82 THE NOVELIST 

only by Mrs. Brunton, whose two novels, " Self- 
Control" and " Discipline," were designed "to 
procure admission for the religion of a sound 
mind and of the Bible where it cannot find ac- 
cess in any other form." Mrs. Brunton was per- 
haps the most commended novelist of her time. 
The inexorable titles of her stories secured for 
them a place upon the guarded book-shelves of 
the young. Many a demure English girl must 
have blessed these deluding titles, just as, forty 
years later, many an English boy blessed the 
inspiration which had impelled George Borrow 
to misname his immortal book " The Bible in 
Spain." When the wife of a clergyman under- 
took to write a novel in the interests of reli- 
gion and the Scriptures; when she called it 
" Discipline," and drew up a stately apology 
for employing fiction as a medium for the les- 
sons she meant to convey, what parent could 
refuse to be beguiled? There is nothing trivial 
in Mrs. Brunton's conception of a good novel, 
in the standard she proposes to the world. 

"Let the admirable construction of fable in 
' Tom Jones ' be employed to unfold characters 
like Miss Edge worth's ; let it lead to a moral 



THE NOVELIST 83 

like Richardson's; let it be told with the ele- 
gance of Rousseau, and with the simplicity of 
Goldsmith ; let it be all this, and Milton need 
not have been ashamed of the work." 

How far " Discipline " and " Self-Control" 
approach this composite standard of perfection 
it would be invidious to ask ; but they accom- 
plished a miracle of their own in being both 
popular and permitted, in pleasing the frivo- 
lous, and edifying the devout. Dedicated to 
Miss Joanna Baillie, sanctioned by Miss Han- 
nah More, they stood above reproach, though 
not without a flavour of depravity. Mrs. Brun- 
ton's outlook upon life was singularly uncom- 
plicated. All her women of fashion are heart- 
less and inane. All her men of fashion cherish 
dishonourable designs upon female youth and 
innocence. Indeed the strenuous efforts of 
Laura, in " Self -Control," to preserve her vir- 
ginity may be thought a trifle explicit for very 
youthful readers. We find her in the first 
chapter — she is seventeen — fainting at the 
feet of her lover, who has just revealed the un- 
worthy nature of his intentions ; and we follow 
her through a series of swoons to the last pages, 



84 THE NOVELIST 

where she "sinks senseless" into — of all ves- 
sels ! — a canoe; and is carried many miles down 
a Canadian river in a state of nicely balanced 
unconsciousness. Her self-control (the crown- 
ing virtue which gives its title to the book) is 
so marked that when she dismisses Hargrave 
on probation, and then meets him accidentally 
in a London print-shop after a four months' 
absence, she " neither screamed nor fainted " ; 
only " trembled violently, and leant against the 
counter to recover strength and composure." 
It is not until he turns, and, " regardless of the 
inquisitive looks of the spectators, clasped her 
to his breast," that " her head sunk upon his 
shoulder, and she lost all consciousness." As 
for her heroic behaviour when the same Har- 
grave (having lapsed from grace) shoots the 
virtuous De Courcy in Lady Pelham's summer- 
house, it must be described in the author's own 
words. No others could do it justice. 

" To the plants which their beauty had recom- 
mended to Lady Pelham, Laura had added a 
few of which the usefulness was known to her. 
Agaric of the oak was of the number ; and she 
had often applied it where many a hand less 



THE NOVELIST 85 

fair would have shrunk from the task. Nor did 
she hesitate now. The ball had entered near 
the neck ; and the feminine, the delicate Laura 
herself disengaged the wound from its covering ; 
the feeling, the tender Laura herself performed 
an office from which false sensibility would have 
recoiled in horror." 

Is it possible that anybody except Miss Bur- 
ney could have shrunk modestly from the sight 
of a lover's neck, especially when it had a buUet 
in it? Could a sense of decorum be more over- 
whelmingly expressed? Yet the same novel 
which held up to our youthful great-grand- 
mothers this unapproachable standard of pro- 
priety presented to their consideration the most 
intimate details of libertinism. There was then, 
as now, no escape from the moralist's devas- 
tating disclosures. 

One characteristic is common to all these 
faded romances, which in their time were read 
with far more fervour and sympathy than are 
their successors to-day. This is the undying and 
undeviating nature of their heroes' affections. 
Written by ladies who took no count of man's 
proverbial inconstancy, they express a touching 



86 THE NOVELIST 

belief in the supremacy of feminine charms. A 
heroine of seventeen (she is seldom older), with 
ringlets, and a " faltering timidity," inflames 
both the virtuous and the profligate with such 
imperishable passions, that when triumphant 
morahty leads her to the altar, defeated vice 
cannot survive her loss. Her suitors, reversing 
the enviable experience of Ben Bolt, — 

weep with delight when she gives them a smile, 
And tremble with fear at her frown. 

They grow faint with rapture when they enter 
her presence, and, when she repels their ad- 
vances, they signify their disappointment by 
gnashing their teeth, and beating their heads 
against the wall. Rejection cannot alienate their 
faithful hearts ; years and absence cannot chill 
their fervour. They belong to a race of men 
who, if they ever existed at all, are now as 
extinct as the mastodon. 

It was Miss Jane Porter who successfully 
transferred to a conquering hero that exquisite 
sensibility of soul which had erstwhile belonged 
to the conquering heroine, — to the Emmelines 
and Adelinas of fiction. Dipping her pen " in 
the tears of Poland," she conveyed the glitter- 



THE NOVELIST 87 

ing drops to the eyes of " Thaddeus of War- 
saw," whence they gush in rills, — like those of 
the Prisoner of Chillon's brother. Thaddeus is of 
such exalted virtue that strangers in London ad- 
dress him as " excellent young gentleman," and 
his friends speak of him as " incomparable young 
man." He rescues children from horses' hoofs 
and from burning buildings. He nurses them 
through small-pox, and leaves their bedsides 
in the most casual manner, to mingle in crowds 
and go to the play. He saves women from in- 
sult on the streets. He is kind even to " that 
poor slandered and abused animal, the cat," — 
which is certainly to his credit. Wrapped in a 
sable cloak, wearing " hearse-like plumes " on 
his hat, a star upon his breast, and a sabre by 
his side, he moves with Hamlet's melancholy 
grace through the five hundred pages of the 
story. " His unrestrained and elegant conversa- 
tion acquired new pathos from the anguish that 
was driven back to his heart: like the beds of 
rivers which infuse their own nature with the 
current, his hidden grief imparted an indescrib- 
able interest and charm to all his sentiments 
and actions." 



88 THE NOVELIST 

What wonder that such a youth is passion- 
ately loved by all the women who cross his path, 
but whom he regards for the most part with 
"that lofty tranquillity which is inseparable 
from high rank when it is accompanied by vir- 
tue." In vain Miss Euphemia Dimdas writes 
him amorous notes, and entraps him into em- 
barrassing situations. In vain Lady Sara Roos 
— married, I regret to say — pursues him to 
his lodgings, and wrings " her snowy arms " 
while she confesses the hopeless nature of her 
infatuation. The irreproachable Thaddeus re- 
places her tenderly but firmly on a sofa, and 
as soon as possible sends her home in a cab. It 
is only when the " orphan heiress," Miss Beau- 
fort, makes her appearance on the scene, "a 
large Turkish shawl enveloping her fine form, 
a modest grace observable in every limb," that 
the exile's haughty soul succumbs to love. Miss 
Beaufort has been admirably brought up by her 
aunt. Lady Somerset, who is a person of great 
distinction, and who gives " conversaziones," 
as famous in their way as Mrs. Proudie's. — 
"There the young Mary Beaufort listened to 
pious divines of every Christian persuasion. 



THE NOVELIST 89 

There she gathered wisdom from real philoso- 
phers; and, in the society of our best living 
poets, cherished an enthusiasm for all that is 
great and good. On these evenings, Sir Rob- 
ert Somerset's house reminded the visitor of 
what he had read or imagined of the School of 
Athens." 

Never do hero and heroine approach each 
other with such spasms of modesty as Thaddeus 
and Miss Beaufort. Their hearts expand with 
emotion, but their mutual sense of propriety 
keeps them remote from all vulgar under- 
standings. In vain " Mary's rosy lips seemed to 
breathe balm while she spoke." In vain " her 
beautiful eyes shone with benevolence." The 
exile, standing proudly aloof, watches with bit- 
ter composure the attentions of more frivolous 
suitors. " His arms were folded, his hat pulled 
over his forehead ; and his long dark eye-lashes 
shading his downcast eyes imparted a dejection 
to his whole air, which wrapped her weeping 
heart round and round with regretful pangs." 
What with his lashes, and his hidden griefs, 
the majesty of his mournful moods, and the 
pleasing pensiveness of his lighter ones, Thad- 



90 THE NOVELIST 

deus so far eclipses his English rivals that they 
may be pardoned for wishing he had kept his 
charms in Poland. Who that has read the 
matchless paragraph which describes the first 
unveiling of the hero's symmetrical leg can for- 
get the sensation it produces? 

" Owing to the warmth of the weather, Thad- 
deus came out this morning without boots ; and 
it being the first time the exquisite proportion 
of his limb had been seen by any of the present 
company excepting Euphemia" (why had Eu- 
phemia been so favoured?), "Lascelles, burst- 
ing with an emotion which he would not call 
envy, measured the count's fine leg with his 
scornful eye." 

When Thaddeus at last expresses his attach- 
ment for Miss Beaufort, he does so kneeling re- 
spectfully in her uncle's presence, and in these 
well-chosen words : " Dearest Miss Beaufort, 
may I indulge myself in the idea that I am 
blessed with your esteem ? " Whereupon Mary 
whispers to Sir Eobert: "Pray, Sir, desire 
him to rise. I am already sufficiently over- 
whelmed ! " and the solemn deed is done. 

" Thaddeus of Warsaw " may be called the 



THE NOVELIST 91 

" Last of the Heroes," and take rank with the 
" Last of the Mohicans," the " Last of the 
Barons," the " Last of the Cavaliers," and all 
the finalities of fiction. With him died that 
noble race who expressed our great-grand- 
mothers' artless ideals of perfection. Seventy 
years later, D'Israeli made a desperate effort 
to revive a pale phantom of departed glory 
in " Lothair," that nursling of the gods, who 
is emphatically a hero, and nothing more. 
"London," we are gravely told, "was at Lo- 
thair's feet." He is at once the hope of United 
Italy, and the bulwark of the English Estab- 
lishment. He is — at twenty-two — the pivot 
of fashionable, poHtical, and clerical diplo- 
macy. He is beloved by the female aristocracy 
of Great Britain ; and mysterious ladies, whose 
lofty souls stoop to no conventionalities, die 
happy with his kisses on their lips. Five hun- 
dred mounted gentlemen compose his simple 
country escort, and the coat of his groom of 
the chambers is made in Saville Row. What 
more could a hero want ? What more could be 
lavished upon him by the most indulgent of 
authors? Yet who shall compare Lothair to 



92 THE NOVELIST 

the noble Thaddeus nodding his hearse-like 
plumes, — Thaddeus dedicated to the "urban- 
ity of the brave," and embalmed in the tears of 
Poland? The inscrutable creator of Lothair 
presented his puppet to a mocking world ; but 
all England and much of the Continent dilated 
with correct emotions when Thaddeus, " uniting 
to the courage of a man the sensibility of a 
woman, and the exalted goodness of an angel " 
(I quote from an appreciative critic), knelt at 
Miss Beaufort's feet. 

Ten years later "Pride and Prejudice" made 
its unobtrusive appearance, and was read by 
that " saving remnant " to whom is confided 
the intellectual welfare of their land. Mrs. El- 
wood, the biographer of England's " Literary 
Ladies," tells us, in the few careless pages 
which she deems sufficient for Miss Austen's 
novels, that there are people who think these 
stories " worthy of ranking with those of Ma- 
dame d' Arblay and Miss Edgeworth " ; but that 
in their author's estimation (and, by inference, 
in her own), " they took up a much more hum- 
ble station." Yet, tolerant even of such infer- 
iority, Mrs. Elwood bids us remember that al^ 



THE NOVELIST 93 

though " the character of Emma is perhaps too 
manoeuvring and too plotting to be perfectly 
amiable," that of Catherine Morland " will not 
suffer greatly even from a comparison with 
Miss Burney's interesting Evelina " ; and that 
" although one is occasionally annoyed by the 
underbred personages of Miss Austen's novels, 
the annoyance is only such as we should feel if 
we were actually in their company." 

It was thus that our genteel great-grand- 
mothers, enamoured of lofty merit and of re- 
fined sensibility, regarded Elizabeth Bennet's 
relations. 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when 
he wrote it. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves. — Dk. 
Johnson. 

It is commonly believed that the extinction of 
verse — of verse in the bulk, which is the way 
in which our great-grandfathers consumed it 
— is due to the vitality of the novel. People, 
we are told, read rhyme and metre with docil- 
ity, only because they wanted to hear a story, 
only because there was no other way in which 
they could get plenty of sentiment and ro- 
mance. As soon as the novel supplied them 
with all the sentiment they wanted, as soon as 
it told them the story in plain prose, they 
turned their backs upon poetry forever. 

There is a transparent inadequacy in this 
solution of a problem which still confronts the 
patient reader of buried masterpieces. Novels 
were plenty when Mr. William Hayley's 
"Triumphs of Temper" went through twelve 
editions, and when Dr. Darwin's " Botanic 
Garden " was received with deferential de- 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 95 

light. But could any dearth of fiction per- 
suade us now to read the " Botanic Garden " ? 
Were we shipwrecked in company with the 
" Triumphs of Temper," would we ever finish 
the first canto ? Novels stood on every Englisli 
book-sheK when Fox read " Madoc " aloud at 
night to his friends, and they stayed up, so he 
says, an hour after their bedtime to hear it. 
Could that miracle be worked to-day? Sir 
Walter Scott, with indestructible amiability, 
reread " Madoc " to please Miss Seward, who, 
having " steeped " her own eyes " in transports 
of tears and sympathy," wrote to him that it 
carried " a master-key to every bosom which 
common good sense and anything resembling 
a human heart inhabit." Scott, unwilling to 
resign all pretensions to a human heart, tried 
hard to share the Swan's emotions, and failed. 
" I cannot feel quite the interest I would like 
to do," he patiently confessed. 

If Southey's poems were not read as Scott's 
and Moore's and Byron's were read (give us 
another Byron, and we will read him with forty 
thousand novels knocking at our doors ! ) ; if 
they were not paid for out of the miraculous 



96 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

depths of Murray's Fortunatus's purse, they 
nevertheless enjoyed a solid reputation of their 
own. They are mentioned in all the letters of 
the period (save and except Lord Byron's 
ribald pages) with carefully measured praise, 
and they enabled their author to accept the 
laureateship on self-respecting terms. They are 
at least, as Sir Leslie Stephen reminds us, more 
readable than Glover's "Leonidas," orWilkie's 
" Epigoniad," and they are shorter, too. Yet 
the " Leonidas," an epic in nine books, went 
through four editions; whereupon its elate 
author expanded it into twelve books ; and the 
public, undaunted, kept on buying it for years. 
The " Epigoniad" is also in nine books. It is 
on record that Hume, who seldom dallied with 
the poets, read all nine, and praised them 
warmly. Mr. Wilkie was christened the " Scot- 
tish Homer," and he bore that modest title 
until his death. It was the golden age of epics. 
The ultimatum of the modern publisher, " No 
poet need apply ! " had not yet blighted the 
hopes and dimmed the lustre of genius. " Every- 
body thinks he can write verse," observed Sir 
Walter mournfully, when called upon for the 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 97 

hundredth time to help a budding aspirant to 
fame. 

With so many competitors in the field, it 
was uncommonly astute in Mr. Hayley to 
address himself exclusively to that sex which 
poets and orators call "fair." There is a 
formal playfulness, a ponderous vivacity about 
the "Triumphs of Temper," which made it 
especially welcome to women. In the preface 
of the first edition the author gallantly laid 
his laurels at their feet, observing modestly 
that it was his desire, however "ineffectual," 
"to imite the sportive wildness of Ariosto and 
the more serious sublime painting of Dante 
with some portion of the enchanting elegance, 
the refined imagination, and the moral graces 
of Pope; and to do this, if possible, without 
violating those rules of propriety which Mr. 
Cambridge has illustrated, by example as well 
as by precept, in the ' Scribleriad,' and in his 
sensible preface to that elegant and learned 
poem." 

Accustomed as we are to the confusions of 
literary perspective, this grouping of Dante, 
Ariosto, and Mr. Cambridge does seem a trifle 



98 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

foresliortened. But our ancestors had none 
of that sensitive shrinking from comparisons 
which is so characteristic of our timid and 
thin-skinned generation. They did not edge 
off from the immortals, afraid to breathe their 
names lest it be held lese-majeste ; they used 
them as the common currency of criticism. 
Why should not Mr. Hayley have challenged 
a contrast with Dante and Ariosto, when Miss 
Seward assured her little world — which was 
also Mr. Hayley's world — that he had the 
"wit and ease" of Prior, a "more varied ver- 
sification" than Pope, and "the fire and the 
invention of Dryden, without any of Dryden's 
absurdity " ? Why should he have questioned 
her judgment, when she wrote to him that 
Cowper's " Task " would " please and instruct 
the race of common readers," who could not 
rise to the beauties of Akenside, or Mason, or 
Milton, or of his (Mr. Hayley^s) "exquisite 
' Triumphs of Temper ' " ? There was a time, 
indeed, when she sorrowed lest his " inventive, 
classical, and elegant muse" should be "de- 
plorably infected" by the growing influence 
of Wordsworth ; but, that peril past, he rose 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 99 

again, the bright particular star of a wide 
feminine horizon. 

Mr. Hayley's didacticism is admirably 
adapted to his readers. The men of the 
eighteenth century were not expected to keep 
their tempers; it was the sweet prerogative of 
wives and daughters to smooth the roughened 
current of family life. Accordingly the heroine 
of the " Triumphs," being bullied by her father, 
a fine old gentleman of the Squire Western type, 
maintains a superhuman cheerfulness, gives 
up the ball for which she is already dressed, 
wreathes her countenance in smiles, and 

with sportive ease, 
Prest her Piano-forte's favourite keys. 

The men of the eighteenth century were all 
hard drinkers. Therefore Mr. Hayley conjures 
the " gentle fair " to avoid even the mild de- 
bauchery of siruped fruits, — 

For the sly fiend, of every art possest, 
Steals on th' affection of her female gTiest ; 
And, by her soft address, seducing each, 
Eager she plies them with a brandy peach. 
They with keen lip the luscious fruit devour. 
But swiftly feel its peace-destroying power. 
Quick through each vein new tides of frenzy roll, 
All evil passions kindle in the soul ; 



100 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

Drive from each feature every cheerful grace, 
And glare ferocious in the sallow face ; 
The wounded nerves in furious conflict tear, 
Then sink in blank dejection and despair. 

All this combustle, to use Gray's favourite word, 
about a brandy peach ! But women have ever 
loved to hear their little errors magnified. In 
the matter of poets, preachers and confessors, 
they are sure to choose the denunciatory. 

Dr. Darwin, as became a scientist and a 
sceptic, addressed his ponderous "Botanic 
Garden " to male readers. It is true that he 
oifers much good advice to women, urging 
upon them especially those duties and devo- 
tions from which he, as a man, was exempt. 
It is true also that when he first contemplated 
writing his epic, he asked Miss Seward — so, 
at least, she said — to be his collaborator; an 
honour which she modestly declined, as not 
" strictly proper for a female pen." But the 
peculiar solidity, the encyclopaedic qualities of 
this masterpiece, fitted it for such grave stu- 
dents as Mr. Edgeworth, who loved to be 
amply instructed. It is a poem replete with 
information, and information of that discon- 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 101 

nected order in which the Edgeworthian soul 
took true delight. We are told, not only about 
flowers and vegetables, but about electric fishes, 
and the salt mines of Poland ; about Dr. Frank- 
lin's lightning rod, and Mrs. Darner's bust of 
the Duchess of Devonshire; about the treat- 
ment of paralytics, and the mechanism of the 
common pump. We pass from the death of 
General Wolfe at Quebec to the equally la- 
mented demise of a lady botanist at Derby. 
We turn from the contemplation of Hannibal 
crossing the Alps to consider the charities of 
a benevolent young woman named Jones. 

Sound, Nymphs of Helicon ! the trump of Fame^ 
And teach Hibernian echoes Jones's name ; 
Bind round her polished brow the civic bay, 
And drag the fair Philanthropist to day. 

Pagan divinities disport themselves on one page, 
and Christian saints on another. St. Anthony 
preaches, not to the little fishes of the brooks 
and streams, but to the monsters of the deep, 
— sharks, porpoises, whales, seals and dol- 
phins, that assemble in a sort of aquatic camp- 
meeting on the shores of the Adriatic, and "get 
religion " in the true revivalist spirit. 



102 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

The listening shoak the quick contagion feel, 
Pant on the floods, inebriate with their zeal ; 
Ope their ;wide jaws, and bow their slimy heads, 
And dash with frantic fins their foamy beds. 

For a freethinker, Dr. Darwin is curiou sly- 
literal in his treatment of hagiology and the 
Scriptures. His Nebuchadnezzar (introduced as 
an illustration of the " Loves of the Plants ") 
is not a bestialized mortal, but a veritable beast, 
like one of Circe's swine, only less easily classi- 
fied in natural history. 

Long eagle plumes his arching neck invest, 

Steal roimd his arms and clasp his sharpened breast ; 

Dark brindled hairs in bristling ranks behind, 

Rise o'er his back and rustle in the wind ; 

Clothe his lank sides, his shrivelled limbs surround. 

And human hands with talons print the groimd. 

Lolls his red tongue, and from the reedy side 

Of slow Euphrates laps the muddy tide. 

Silent, in shining troups, the Courtier throng 

Pursue their monarch as he crawls along ; 

E'en Beauty pleads in vain with smiles and tears, 

Not Flattery's self can pierce his pendant ears. 

The picture of the embarrassed courtiers pro- 
menading slowly after this royal phenomenon, 
and of the lovely inconsiderates proffering their 
vain allurements, is so ludicrous as to be pain- 
ful. Even Miss Seward, who held that the 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 103 

•'Botanic Garden " combined "the sublimity of 
Michael Angelo, the correctness and elegance 
of Eaphael, with the glow of Titian," was 
shocked by Nebuchadnezzar's pendant ears, and 
admitted that the passage was likely to provoke 
inconsiderate laughter. 

The first part of Dr. Darwin's poem, " The 
Economy of Vegetation," was warmly praised 
by critics and reviewers. Its name alone se- 
cured for it esteem. A few steadfast souls, like 
Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, refused to accept even 
vegetation from a sceptic's hands ; but it was 
generally conceded that the poet had " entwined 
the Parnassian laurel with the balm of Phar- 
macy" in a very creditable manner. The last 
four cantos, however, — indiscreetly entitled 
"The Loves of the Plants," — awakened grave 
concern. They were held unfit for female youth, 
which, being then taught driblets of science in 
a guarded and muffled fashion, was not sup- 
posed to know that flowers had any sex, much 
less that they practised polygamy. The glar- 
ing indiscretion of their behaviour in the " Bo- 
tanic Garden," their seraglios, their amorous 
embraces and involuntary libertinism, offended 



104 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

British decorum, and, what was worse, exposed 
the poem to Canning's pungent ridicule. When 
the "Loves of the Triangles " appeared in the 
" An ti- Jacobin," all England — except Whigs 
and patriots who never laughed at Canning's 
jokes — was moved to inextinguishable mirth. 
The mock seriousness of the introduction and 
argument, the "horrid industry" of the notes, 
the contrast between the pensiveness of the Cy- 
cloid and the innocent playfulness of the Pen- 
dulum, the solemn headshake over the licen- 
tious disposition of Optics, and the description 
of the three Curves that requite the passion of 
the Rectangle, all burlesque with unfeeling 
delight Dr. Darvdn's ornate pedantry. 

Let shrill Acoustics tune the tiny lyre, 
With Euclid sage fair Algebra conspire ; 
Let Hydrostatics, simpering as they go, 
Lead the light Naiads on fantastic toe. 

The indignant poet, frigidly vain, and im- 
maculately free from any taint of humour, was 
as much scandalized as hurt by this light-hearted 
mockery. Being a dictator in his own little 
circle at Derby, he was naturally disposed to 
consider the "Anti-Jacobin " a menace to genius 



ON THE SLOPES OF PAKNASSUS 105 

and to patriotism. His criticisms and his pre- 
scriptions had hitherto been received with equal 
submission. When he told his friends that 
Akenside was a better poet than Milton, — 
" more polished, pure, and dignified," they lis- 
tened with respect. When he told his patients 
to eat acid fruits with plenty of sugar and 
cream, they obeyed with alacrity. He had a 
taste for inventions, and first made Mr. Edge- 
worth's acquaintance by showing him an in- 
genious carriage of his own contrivance, which 
was designed to facilitate the movements of the 
horse, and enable it to turn with ease. The 
fact that Dr. Darwin was three times thrown 
from this vehicle, and that the third accident 
lamed him for life, in no way disconcerted the 
inventor or his friends, who loved mechanism 
for its own sake, and apart from any given re- 
sults. Dr. Darwin defined a fool as one who 
never in his life tried an experiment. So did 
Mr. Day, of " Sandford and Merton " fame, 
who experimented in the training of animals, 
and was killed by an active young colt that had 
failed to grasp the system. 

The " Botanic Garden " was translated into 



106 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

French, Italian, and Portuguese, to the great 
relief of Miss Seward, who hated to think that 
the immortality of such a work depended upon 
the preservation of a single tongue. " Should 
that tongue perish," she wrote proudly, " trans- 
lations would at least retain all the host of 
beauties which do not depend upon felicities 
of verbal expression." 

If the interminable epics which were so 
popular in these halcyon days had condescended 
to the telling of stories, we might believe that 
they were read, or at least occasionally read, as 
a substitute for prose fiction. But the truth is 
that most of them are solid treatises on moral- 
ity, or agriculture, or therapeutics, cast into 
the blankest of blank verse, and valued, pre- 
sumably, for the sake of the information they 
conveyed. Their very titles savour of statement 
rather than of inspiration. Nobody in search 
of romance would take up Dr. Grainger's 
" Sugar Cane," or Dyer's " Fleece," or the 
Rev. Richard Polwhele's " English Orator." 
Nobody desiring to be idly amused would read 
the "Vales of Weaver," or a long didactic 
poem on " The Influence of Local Attach- 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 107 

ment." It was not because he felt himseK to 
be a poet that Dr. Grainger wrote the " Sugar 
Cane " in verse, but because that was the form 
most acceptable to the public. The ever famous 

line, 

" Now Muae, let 's sing of rats ! " 

which made merry Sir Joshua Reynolds and 
his friends, is indicative of the good doctor's 
struggles to employ an uncongenial medium. 
He wanted to tell his readers how to farm suc- 
cessfully in the West Indies ; how to keep well 
in a treacherous climate ; what food to eat, what 
drugs to take, how to look after the physical 
condition of negro servants, and guard them 
from prevalent maladies. These were matters 
on which the author was qualified to speak, and 
on which he does speak with aU a physician's 
frankness ; but they do not lend themselves to 
lofty strains. Whole pages of the " Sugar 
Cane " read like prescriptions and dietaries 
done into verse. It is as difficult to sing 
with dignity about a disordered stomach as 
about rats and cockroaches; and Dr. Grain- 
ger's determination to leave nothing untold 
leads him to dwell with much feeling, but 



108 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

little grace, on all the disadvantages of the 
tropics. 

Musquitoes, sand-flies, seek the sheltered roof, 
And with fell rage the stranger guest assail, 
Nor spare the sportive child ; from their retreats 
Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad. 

The truthfulness and sobriety of this last line 
deserve commendation. Cockroaches in the 
open are displeasing to sensitive souls ; and a 
footnote, half a page long, tells us everything 
we could possibly desire — or fear — to know 
about these insects. As an example of Dr. 
Grainger's thoroughness in the treatment of 
such themes, I quote with delight his approved 
method of poisoning alligators. 

With Misnian arsenic, deleterious bane, 

Pound up the ripe cassada's well-rasped root, 

And form in pellets ; these profusely spread 

Round the Cane-groves where skulk the vermin-breed. 

They, greedy, and unweeting of the bait, 

Crowd to the inviting cates, and swift devour 

Their palatable Death ; for soon they seek 

The neighbouring spring ; and drink, and swell, and die. 

Then follow some very sensible remarks about 
the unwholesomeness of the water in which the 
dead alligators are decomposing, — remarks 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 109 

which Mr. Kipling has unconsciously paro- 
died : — 

But 'e gets into the drinking casks, and then o' course we 
dies. 

The wonderful thing about the "Sugar- 
Cane " is that it was read ; — nay, more, that 
it was read aloud at the house of Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, and though the audience laughed, it 
listened. Dodsley published the poem in hand- 
some style ; a second edition was called for ; it 
was reprinted in Jamaica, and pirated (what 
were the pirates thinking about!) in 1766. 
Even Dr. Johnson wrote a friendly notice in 
the London " Chronicle," though he always 
maintained that the poet might just as well 
have sung the beauties of a parsley-bed or of a 
cabbage garden. He took the same high ground 
when Boswell called his attention to Dyer's 
" Fleece." — " The subject. Sir, cannot be 
made poetical. How can a man write poetically 
of serges and druggets?" 

It was not for the sake of sentiment or story 
that the English public read " The Fleece." 
Nor could it have been for practical guidance ; 
for farmers, even in 1757, must have had some 



110 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

musty almanacs, some plain prose manuals to 
advise them. They could never have waited to 
learn from an epic poem that 

the coughing pest 
From their green pastures sweeps whole flocks away, 

or that 

Sheep also pleurisies and dropsies know, 

or that 

The infectious scah, arising from extremes 
Of want or surfeit, is by water cured 
Of lime, or sodden stave-acre, or oil 
Dispersive of Norwegian tar. 

Did the British woolen-drapers of the period 
require to be told in verse about 

Cheyney, and bayse, and serge, and alepine, 
Tammy, and crape, and the long countless list 
Of woolen webs. 

Surely they knew more about their own dry- 
goods than did Mr. Dyer. Is it possible that 
British parsons read Mr. Polwhele's "English 
Orator " for the sake of his somewhat confused 
advice to preachers ? — 

Meantime thy Style familiar, that alludes 
With pleasing Retrospect to recent Scenes 
Or Incidents amidst thy Flock, fresh graved 
On Memory, shall recall their scattered Thoughts, 
And interest every Bosom. With the Voice 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 111 

Of condescending Gentleness address 
Thy kindred People. 

It was Miss Seward's opinion that the neg- 
lect of Mr. Polwhele's " poetic writings " was 
a disgrace to literary England, from which we 
conclude that the reverend author outwore the 
patience of his readers. "Mature in dulness 
from his earliest years," he had wisely adopted 
a profession which gave his qualities room for 
expansion. What his congregation must have 
suffered when he addressed it with "conde- 
scending gentleness," we hardly like to think ; 
but free-born Englishmen, who were so fortu- 
nate as not to hear him, refused to make good 
their loss by reading the "English Orator," 
even after it had been revised by a bishop. 
Miss Seward praised it highly ; in return for 
which devotion she was hailed as a " Parnas- 
sian sister " in six benedictory stanzas. 

Still gratitude her stores among-, 

Shall bid the plausive poet sing ; 
And, if the last of all the throng 

That rise on the poetic wing. 
Yet not regardless of his destined way, 
If Seward's envied sanction stamps the lay. 

The Swan, indeed, was never without admir- 



112 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

ers. Her " Louisa ; a Poetical Novel in four 
Epistles," was favourably noticed ; Dr. John- 
son praised her ode on the death of Captain 
Cook ; and no contributor to the Bath Easton 
vase received more myrtle wreaths than she 
did. " Warble " was the word commonly used 
by partial critics in extolling her verse. " Long 
may she continue to warble as heretofore, in 
such numbers as few even of our favourite 
bards would be shy to own." Scott sorrowfully 
admitted to Miss Baillie that he found these 
warblings — of which he was the reluctant ed- 
itor — " execrable " ; and that the despair which 
fiUed his soul on receiving Miss Seward's let- 
ters gave him a lifelong horror of sentiment ; 
but for once it is impossible to sympathize 
with Sir Walter's sufferings. If he had never 
praised the verses, he would never have been 
called upon to edit them ; and James Ballan- 
tyne would have been saved the printing of an 
unsalable book. There is no lie so little worth 
the telling as that which is spoken in pure 
kindness to spare a wholesome pang. 

It was, however, the pleasant custom of the 
time to commend and encourage female poets, as 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 113 

we commend and encourage a child's unsteady 
footsteps. The generous Hayley welcomed with 
open arms these fair competitors for fame. 

The bards of Britain with unjaundiced eyes 
Will glory to behold such rivals rise. 

He ardently flattered Miss Seward, and for 
Miss Hannah More his enthusiasm knew no 
bounds. 

But with a magical control, 

Thy spirit-moving strain 
Dispels the languor of the sou], 

Annihilating pain. 

" Spirit-moving " seems the last epithet in the 
world to apply to Miss More's strains; but 
there is no doubt that the public believed her 
to be as good a poet as a preacher, and that it 
supported her high estimate of her own powers. 
After a visit to another lambent flame, Mrs. 
Barbauld, she writes with irresistible gravity : 
" Mrs. B. and I have found out that we feel 
as little envy and malice towards each other, 
as though we had neither of us attempted to 
' buHd the lofty rhyme ' ; although she says 
this is what the envious and the malicious can 
never be brought to believe." 



114 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 

Think of the author of " The Search after 
Happiness'' and the author of "A Poetical 
Epistle to Mr.Wilberforce " loudly refusing to 
envy each other's eminence ! There is nothing 
like it in the strife-laden annals of fame. 

Finally there stepped into the arena that 
charming embodiment of the female muse, Mrs. 
Hemans; and the manly heart of Protestant 
England warmed into homage at her shrine. 
From the days she "first carolled forth her 
poetic talents under the animating influence 
of an affectionate and admiring circle," to the 
days when she faded gracefully out of life, her 
" half-etherealized spirit " rousing itself to dic- 
tate a last " Sabbath Sonnet," she was crowned 
and garlanded with bays. In the first place, she 
was fair to see, — Fletcher's bust shows real 
loveliness ; and it was Christopher North's 
opinion that " no really ugly woman ever wrote 
a truly beautiful poem the length of her little 
finger." In the second place, she was sincerely 
pious ; and the Ettrick Shepherd reflected the 
opinion of his day when he said that " without 
religion, a woman 's just an even-down deevil." 
The appealing helplessness of Mrs. Hemans's 



ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 115 

gentle and affectionate nature, the narrowness 
of her sympathies, and the limitations of her 
art were all equally acceptable to critics like 
Gifford and Jeffrey, who held strict views as 
to the rounding of a woman's circle. Even 
Byron heartily approved of a pious and pretty 
woman writing pious and pretty poems. Even 
Wordsworth flung her lordly words of praise. 
Even Shelley wrote her letters so eager and 
ardent that her very sensible mamma, Mrs. 
Browne, requested him to cease. And as for 
Scott, though he confessed she was too poetical 
for his taste, he gave her always the honest 
friendship she deserved. It was to her he said, 
when some tourists left them hurriedly at New- 
ark Tower: "Ah, Mrs. Hemans, they little 
know what two lions they are running away 
from." It was to her he said, when she was 
leaving Abbotsford: "There are some whom 
we meet, and should like ever after to claim as 
kith and kin ; and you are of this number." 

Who would not gladly have written " The 
Siege of Valencia" and "The Vespers of Pa- 
lermo," to have heard Sir Walter say these 
words? 



THE LITERARY LADY 

Out-pensioners of Parnassus. — Horace Walpolb. 

In this overrated century of progress, when 
women have few favours shown them, but are 
asked to do their work or acknowledge their 
deficiencies, the thoughtful mind turns discon- 
solately back to those urbane days when every 
tottering step they took was patronized and 
praised. It must have been very pleasant to be 
able to publish " Paraphrases and Imitations 
of Horace," without knowing a word of Latin. 
Latin is a difficidt language to study, and much 
useful time may be wasted in acquiring it ; there- 
fore Miss Anna Seward eschewed the tedious 
process which most translators deem essential. 
Yet her paraphrases were held to have caught 
the true Horatian spirit ; and critics praised 
them all the more indulgently because of their 
author's feminine attitude to the classics. 
" Over the lyre of Horace," she wrote elegantly 
to Mr. Repton, " I throw an unfettered hand." 
It may be said that critics were invariably 



THE LITERARY LADY 117 

indulgent to female writers (listen to Christo- 
pher North purring over Mrs. Hemans !) until 
they stepped, like Charlotte Bronte, from their 
appointed spheres, and hotly challenged the 
competition of the world. This was a disagree- 
able and a disconcerting thing for them to do. 
Nobody could patronize "Jane Eyre," and none 
of the pleasant things which were habitually 
murmured about " female excellence and talent " 
seemed to fit this firebrand of a book. Had 
Charlotte Bronte taken to heart Mrs. King's 
"justly approved work" on "The Beneficial 
Effects of the Christian Temper upon Domestic 
Happiness," she would not have shocked and 
pained the sensitive reviewer of the " Quar- 
terly." 

It was in imitation of that beacon light. Miss 
Hannah More, that Mrs. King wrote her 
famous treatise. It was in imitation of Miss 
Hannah More that Mrs. Trimmer (abhorred by 
Lamb) wrote " The Servant's Friend," " Help 
to the Unlearned," and the " Charity School 
Spelling Book," — works which have passed out 
of the hands of men, but whose titles survive to 
fill us with wonder and admiration. Was there 



118 THE LITERARY LADY 

ever a time when the unlearned frankly recog- 
nized their ignorance, and when a mistress 
ventured to give her housemaids a " Servant's 
Friend"? Was spelling in the charity schools 
different from spelling elsewhere, or were 
charity-school children taught a limited vocabu- 
lary, from which all words of rank had been 
eliminated ? Those were days when the upper 
classes were affable and condescending, when 
the rural poor — if not intoxicated — curtsied 
and invoked blessings on their benefactors all 
day long, and when benevolent ladies told the 
village politicians what it was well for them to 
know. But even at this restful period, a 
" Charity School Spelling Book" seems ill cal- 
culated to inspire the youthful student with 
enthusiasm. 

Mrs. Trimmer's attitude to the public was 
marked by that refined diffidence which was 
considered becoming in a female. Her biogra- 
pher assures us that she never coveted literary 
distinction, although her name was celebrated 
"wherever Christianity was established, and the 
English language was spoken." Royalty took 
her by the hand, and bishops expressed their 



THE LITERARY LADY 119 

overwhelming sense of obligation. We sigh to 
think how many ladies became famous against 
their wills a hundred and fifty years ago, and 
how hard it is now to raise our aspiring heads. 
There was Miss — or, as she preferred to be 
called, Mrs. — Carter, who read Greek, and 
translated Epictetus, who was admired by " the 
great, the gay, the good, and the learned " ; yet 
who could with difficulty be persuaded to bear 
the burden of her own eminence. It was the 
opinion of her friends that Miss Carter had 
conferred a good deal of distinction upon Epic- 
tetus by her translation, — by setting, as Dr. 
Young elegantly phrased it, this Pagan jewel 
in gold. We find Mrs. Montagu writing to this 
effect, and expressing in round terms her sense 
of the philosopher's obligation. " Might not 
such an honour from a fair hand make even an 
Epictetus proud, without being censured for it? 
Nor let Mrs. Carter's amiable modesty become 
blameable by taking offence at the truth, but 
stand the shock of applause which she has 
brought upon her own head." 

It was very comforting to receive letters like 
this, to be called upon to brace one's self against 



120 THE LITERARY LADY 

the shock of applause, instead of against the 
chilly douche of disparagement. Miss Carter 
retorted, as in duty bound, by imploring her 
friend to employ her splendid abilities upon 
some epoch-making work, — some work which, 
while it entertained the world, " would be ap- 
plauded by angels, and registered in Heaven." 
Perhaps the uncertainty of angelic readers 
daunted even Mrs. Montagu, for she never re- 
sponded to this and many similar appeals ; but 
suffered her literary reputation to rest secure 
on her defence of Shakespeare, and three papers 
contributed to Lord Lyttelton's " Dialogues of 
the Dead." Why, indeed, should she have la- 
boured further, when, to the end of her long and 
honoured life, men spoke of her "transcend- 
ent talents," her " magnificent attainments " ? 
Had she written a history of the world, she 
could not have been more reverently praised. 
Lord Lyttelton, transported with pride at hav- 
ing so distinguished a collaborator, wrote to her 
that the French translation of the " Dialogues" 
was as well done as " the poverty of the French 
tongue would permit " ; and added imctuously, 
" but such eloquence as yours must lose by 



THE LITERARY LADY 121 

being translated into any other language. Your 
form and manner would seduce Apollo himself 
on his throne of criticism on Parnassus." 

Lord Lyttelton was perhaps more remark- 
able for amiability than for judgment ; but Sir 
Nathaniel Wraxall, who wrote good letters him- 
self, ardently admired Mrs. Montagu's, and 
pronounced her " the Madame du Deffand of 
the English capital." Cowper meekly admitted 
that she stood at the head " of all that is called 
learned," and that every critic " veiled his bon- 
net before her superior judgment." Even Dr. 
Johnson, though he despised the " Dialogues," 
and protested to the end of his life that Shake- 
speare stood in no need of Mrs. Montagu's 
championship, acknowledged that the lady was 
well-informed and intelligent. " Conversing 
with her," he said, " you may find variety in 
one " ; and this charming phrase stands now as 
the most generous interpretation of her fame. 
It is something we can credit amid the be- 
wildering nonsense which was talked and writ- 
ten about a woman whose hospitality dazzled 
society, and whose assertiveness dominated her 
friends. 



122 THE LITERARY LADY 

There were other literary ladies belonging to 
this charmed circle whose reputations rested 
on frailer foundations. Mrs. Montagu did 
write the essay on Shakespeare and the three 
dialogues. Miss Carter did translate Epicte- 
tus. Mrs. Chapone did write " Letters on the 
Improvement of the Mind," which so gratified 
George the Third and Queen Charlotte that 
they entreated her to compose a second volume ; 
and she did dally a little with verse, for one of 
her odes was prefixed — Heaven knows why ! 
— to Miss Carter's "Epictetus"; and the 
Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, even little 
Prince William, were all familiar with this 
masterpiece. There never was a lady more 
popular with a reigning house, and, when we 
dip into her pages, we know the reason why. 
A firm insistence upon admitted truths, a lov- 
ing presentation of the obvious, a generous 
championship of those sweet commonplaces we 
all deem dignified and safe, made her especially 
pleasing to good King George and his consort. 
Even her letters are models of sapiency. " Tho' 
I meet with no absolutely perfect character," 
she writes to Sir William Pepys, " yet where 



THE LITERARY LADY 123 

I find a good disposition, improved by good 
principles and virtuous habits, I feel a moral 
assurance that I shall not find any flagrant 
vices in the same person, and that I shall never 
see him fall into any very criminal action." 

The breadth and tolerance of this admission 
must have startled her correspondent, seasoned 
though he was to intellectual audacity. Nor 
was Mrs. Chapone lacking in the gentle art of 
seK-advancement ; for, when about to publish a 
volume of " Miscellanies," she requested Sir 
William to write an essay on " Affection and 
Simplicity," or " Enthusiasm and Indiffer- 
ence," and permit her to print it as her own. 
" If your ideas suit my way of thinking," she 
tells him encouragingly, " I can cool them 
down to my manner of writing, for we must 
not have a hotchpotch of Styles; and if, for 
any reason, I should not be able to make use 
of them, you will still have had the benefit of 
having written them, and may peaceably pos- 
sess your own property." 

There are many ways of asking a favour ; but 
to assume that you are granting the favour 
that you ask shows spirit and invention. Had 



124 THE LITERARY LADY 

Mrs. Chapone written nothing but this model 
of all begging letters, she would be worthy to 
take high rank among the literary ladies of 
Great Britain. 

It is more difficult to establish the claim of 
Mrs. Boscawen, who looms nebulously on the 
horizon as the wife of an admiral, and the 
friend of Miss Hannah More, from whom she 
received flowing compliments in the "Bas 
Bleu." 

Eacli art of conversation knowing, 
High-bred, elegant Boscawen. 

We are told that this lady was " distinguished 
by the strength of her understanding, the 
poignancy of her humour, and the brilliancy of 
her wit " ; but there does not survive the mildest 
joke, the smallest word of wisdom to illustrate 
these qualities. Then there was Mrs. Schimmel- 
penninck, whose name alone was a guarantee 
of immortality ; and the " sprightly and pleas- 
ing Mrs. Ironmonger " ; and Miss Lee, who 
could repeat the whole of Miss Burney's " Ce- 
cilia " (a shocking accomplishment) ; and the 
vivacious Miss Monckton, whom Johnson called 
a dunce ; and Miss Elizabeth Hamilton, a use- 



THE LITERARY LADY 125 

ful person, "equally competent to form the 
minds and manners of the daughters of a no- 
bleman, and to reform the simple but idle 
habits of the peasantry"; and Mrs. Bennet, 
whose letters — so Miss Seward tells us — 
"breathed Ciceronean spirit and eloquence," 
and whose poems revealed " the terse neatness, 
humour, and gayety of Swift," which makes 
it doubly distressful that neither letters nor 
poems have survived. Above all, there was the 
mysterious "Sylph," who glides — sylphlike — 
through a misty atmosphere of conjecture and 
adulation ; and about whom we feel some of the 
fond solicitude expressed over and over again 
by the letter-writers of this engaging period. 

Translated into prose, the Sylph becomes 
Mrs. Agmondesham Vesey, — 

Vesey, of verse the judge and friend, — 

a fatuous deaf lady, with a taste for literary 
society, and a talent for arranging chairs. She 
it was who first gathered the "Blues" to- 
gether, placing them in little groups — gener- 
ally back to back — and flitting so rapidly 
from one group to another, her ear-trumpet 
hung around her neck, that she never heard 



126 THE LITERARY LADY 

more than a few broken sentences of conver- 
sation. She had what Miss Hannah More 
amiably called " plastic genius," which meant 
that she fidgeted perpetually ; and what Miss 
Carter termed " a delightful spirit of innocent 
irregularity," which meant that she was incon- 
sequent to the danger point. " She united," said 
Madame d'Arblay, " the unguardedness of child- 
hood to a Hibernian bewilderment of ideas 
which cast her incessantly into some burlesque 
situation." But her kind-heartedness (she pro- 
posed having her drawing-room gravelled, so 
that a lame friend could walk on it without 
slipping) made even her absurdities lovable, 
and her most fantastic behaviour was tolerated 
as proof of her aerial essence. " There is no- 
thing of mere vulgar mortality about our 
Sylph," wrote Miss Carter proudly. 

It was in accordance with this pleasing illu- 
sion that, when Mrs. Vesey took a sea voyage, 
her friends spoke of her as though she were a 
mermaid, disporting herself in, instead of on, 
the ocean. They not only held " the uproar of 
a stormy sea to be as well adapted to the sub- 
lime of her imagination as the soft murmur of 



THE LITERARY LADY 127 

a gliding stream to the gentleness of her tem- 
per " (so much might at a pinch be said about 
any of us) ; but we find Miss Carter writing 
to Mrs. Montagu in this perplexing strain : — 

"I fancy our Sylph has not yet left the 
coral groves and submarine palaces in which 
she would meet with so many of her fellow 
nymphs on her way to England. I think if she 
had landed, we should have had some inform- 
ation about it, either from herseK or from some- 
body else who knows her consequence to us." 

The poor Sylph seems to have had rather a 
hard time of it after the death of the Honour- 
able Agmondesham, who relished his wife's 
vagaries so little, or feared them so much, that 
he left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, a 
respectable young man with no unearthly qual- 
ities. The heir, however, behaved generously 
to his widowed aunt, giving her an income 
large enough to permit her to live with com- 
fort, and to keep her coach. Miss Carter was 
decidedly of the opinion that Mr. Vesey made 
such a " detestable " will because he was lack- 
ing in sound religious principles, and she ex- 
pressed in plain terms her displeasure with 



128 THE LITERARY LADY 

her friend for mourning persistently over the 
loss of one who " so little deserved her tears." 
But the Sylph, lonely, middle-aged, and deaf, 
realized perhaps that her little day was over. 
Mrs. Montagu's profuse hospitality had sup- 
planted " the biscuit's ample sacrifice." People 
no longer cared to sit back to back, talking 
platitudes through long and hungry evenings. 
The "innocent irregularity" deepened into 
melancholy, into madness ; and the Sylph, a 
piteous mockery of her old sweet foolish self, 
faded away, dissolving like Niobe in tears. 

It may be noted that the mission of the 
literary lady throughout all these happy years 
was to elevate and refine. Her attitude towards 
matters of the intellect was one of obtrusive 
humility. It is recorded that " an accomplished 
and elegant female writer " (the name, alas ! 
withheld) requested Sir WiUiam Pepys to 
mark all the passages in Madame de Stael's 
works which he considered "above her com- 
prehension." Sir William " with ready wit " 
declined this invidious task; but agreed to 
mark aU he deemed " worthy of her attention." 
We hardly know what to admire the most in 



THE LITERARY LADY 129 

a story like this ; — the lady's modesty, Sir 
William's tact, or the revelation it affords of in- 
finite leisure. When we remember the relent- 
less copiousness of Madame de Stael's books, 
we wonder if the amiable annofcator lived long 
enough to finish his task. 

In matters of morality, however, the female 
pen was held to be a bulwark of Great Britain. 
The ambition to prove that — albeit a woman 
— one. may be on terms of literary intimacy 
with the seven deadly sins (" Je ne suis qu'un 
pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois 
pas en Dieu plus que les autres ") had not yet 
dawned upon the feminine horizon. The liter- 
ary lady accepted with enthusiasm the limita- 
tions of her sex, and turned them to practical 
account ; she laid with them the foundations of 
her fame. Mrs. Montagu, an astute woman of 
the world, recognized in what we should now 
call an enfeebling propriety her most valuable 
asset. It sanctified her attack upon Voltaire, 
it enabled her to snub Dr. Johnson, and it 
made her, in the opinion of her friends, the 
natural and worthy opponent of Lord Chester- 
field. She was entreated to come to the rescue 



130 THE LITERARY LADY 

of British morality by denouncing that noble- 
man's "profligate" letters; and we find the Rev. 
Montagu Pennington lamenting years after- 
wards her refusal " to apply her wit and genius 
to counteract the mischief which Lord Ches- 
terfield's volumes had done." 

Miss Hannah More's dazzling renown rested 
on the same solid support. She was so strong 
morally that to have cavilled at her intellectual 
feebleness would have been deemed profane. 
Her advice (she spent the best part of eighty- 
eight years in offering it) was so estimable that 
its general inadequacy was never ascertained. 
Rich people begged her to advise the poor. 
Great people begged her to advise the humble. 
Satisfied people begged her to advise the dis- 
contented. Sir William Pepys wrote to her in 
1792, imploring her to avert from England the 
threatened dangers of radicalism and a division 
of land by writing a dialogue " between two 
persons of the lowest order," in which should 
be set forth the discomforts of land ownership, 
and the advantages of labouring for small 
wages at trades. This simple and childlike 
scheme would, in Sir William's opinion, go far 



THE LITERARY LADY 131 

towards making English workmen contented 
with their lot, and might eventually save the 
country from the terrible bloodshed of France. 
Was ever higher tribute paid to sustained and 
triumphant propriety? Look at Mary Woll- 
stonecraft vindicating the rights of woman in 
sordid poverty, in tears and shame ; and look 
at Hannah More, an object of pious pilgrimage 
at Cowslip Green. Her sisters were awestruck 
at finding themselves the guardians of such pre- 
eminence. Miss Seward eloquently addressed 
them as 

sweet satellites that gently bear 
Your lesser radiance round this beamy star ; 

and, being the humblest sisters ever known, 
they seemed to have liked the appellation. 
They guarded their luminary from common 
contact with mankind ; they spoke of her as 
" she " (like Mr. Eider Haggard's heroine), 
and they explained to visitors how good and 
great she was, and what a condescension it 
would be on her part to see them, when two 
peeresses and a bishop had been turned away 
the day before. " It is an exquisite pleasure," 
wrote Miss Carter enthusiastically, " to find 



132 THE LITERARY LADY 

distinguislied talents and sublime virtue placed 
in such an advantageous situation " ; and the 
modern reader is reminded against his will of 
the lively old actress who sighed out to the 
painter Mulready her unavailing regrets over 
a misspent life. " Ah, Mulready, if I had only 
been virtuous, it would have been pounds and 
pounds in my pocket.'' 

" Harmonious virgins," sneered Horace Wal- 
pole, " whose thoughts and phrases are like their 
gowns, old remnants cut and turned " ; and it is 
painful to know that in these ribald words he 
is alluding to the Swan of Lichfield, and to the 
" glowing daughter of Apollo," Miss Helen 
Maria Williams. The Swan probably never 
did have her gowns cut and turned, for she 
was a well-to-do lady with an income of four 
hundred pounds ; and she lived very grandly 
in the bishop's palace at Lichfield, where her 
father (" an angel, but an ass," according to 
Coleridge) had been for many years a canon. 
But Apollo having, after the fashion of gods, 
bequeathed nothing to his glowing daughter 
but the gift of song, Miss Williams might oc- 
casionally have been glad of a gown to turn. 



THE LITERARY LADY 133 

Her juvenile poem " Edwin and Eltruda " en- 
riclied her in fame only ; but " Peru," being 
published by subscription (blessed days when 
friends could be turned into subscribers !), 
must have been fairly remunerative; and we 
hear of its author in London giving " literary 
breakfasts," a popular but depressing form of 
entertainment. If ever literature be " alien to 
the natural man," it is at the breakfast hour. 
Miss Williams subsequently went to Paris, and 
became an ardent revolutionist, greatly to the 
distress of poor Miss Seward, whose enthusiasm 
for the cause of freedom had suffered a decline, 
and who kept imploring her friend to come 
home. " Fly, my dear Helen, that land of car- 
nage ! " she wrote beseechingly. But Helen 
could n't fly, being then imprisoned by the un- 
grateful revolutionists, who seemed unable, or 
unwilling, to distinguish friends from foes. She 
had moreover by that time allied herseK to Mr. 
John Hurford Stone, a gentleman of the strict- 
est religious views, but without moral prejudices, 
who abandoned his lawful wife for Apollo's 
offspring, and who, as a consequence, pre- 
ferred living on the Continent. Therefore Miss 



134 THE LITERARY LADY 

Williams fell forever from the bright circle of 
literary stars ; and Lady Morgan, who met her 
years afterwards in Paris, had nothing more 
interesting to record than that she had grown 
" immensely fat," — an unpoetic and unworthy 
thing to do. " For when corpulence, which is a 
gift of evil, Cometh upon age, then are vanished 
the days of romance and of stirring deeds." 

Yet sentiment, if not romance, clung illu- 
sively to the literary lady, even when she 
surrendered nothing to persuasion. Strange 
shadowy stories of courtship are told with pa- 
thetic simplicity. Miss Carter, " when she had 
nearly attained the mature age of thirty," was 
wooed by a nameless gentleman of unexcep- 
tionable character, whom " she was induced 
eventually to refuse, in consequence of his 
having written some verses, of the nature of 
which she disapproved." Whether these verses 
were improper (perish the thought!) or merely 
ill-advised, we shall never know ; but as the re- 
jected suitor " expressed ever after a strong sense 
of Miss Carter's handsome behaviour to him," 
there seems to have been on his part something 
perilously akin to acquiescence. " I wonder," 



THE LITERARY LADY 135 

says the wise Elizabeth Bennet, " who first dis- 
covered the efficacy of poetry in driving away 
love." It is a pleasure to turn from such un- 
certainties to the firm outlines and providential 
issues of Miss Hannah More's early attach- 
ment. When the wealthy Mr. Turner, who had 
wooed and won the lady, manifested an un- 
worthy reluctance to marry her, she consented 
to receive, in lieu of his heart and hand, an in- 
come of two hundred pounds a year, which 
enabled her to give up teaching, and com- 
mence author at the age of twenty-two. The 
wedding day had been fixed, the wedding dress 
was made, but the wedding bells were never 
rung, and the couple — like the lovers in the 
storybooks — lived happily ever after. The only 
measure of retaliation which Miss More per- 
mitted herself was to send Mr. Turner a copy 
of every book and of every tract she wrote; 
while that gentleman was often heard to say, 
when the tracts came thick and fast, that Provi- 
dence had overruled his desire to make so ad- 
mirable a lady his wife, because she was destined 
for higher things. 

It was reserved for the Lichfield Swan to 



136 THE LITERARY LADY 

work the miracle of miracles, and rob love o£ 
inconstancy. She was but eighteen when she 
inspired a passion " as fervent as it was last- 
ing" in the breast of Colonel Taylor, men- 
tioned by discreet biographers as Colonel T. 
The young man being without income, Mr. 
Seward, who was not altogether an ass, de- 
clined the alliance ; and when, four years later, 
a timely inheritance permitted a renewal of the 
suit, Miss Seward had wearied of her lover. 
Colonel Taylor accordingly married another 
young woman ; but the remembrance of the 
Swan, and an unfortunate habit he had ac- 
quired of openly bewailing her loss, " clouded 
with gloom the first years of their married 
life." The patient Mrs. Taylor became in time 
so deeply interested in the object of her hus- 
band's devotion that she opened a correspond- 
ence with Miss Seward, — who was the cham- 
pion letter-writer of England, — repeatedly 
sought to make her acquaintance, and " with 
melancholy enthusiasm was induced to invest 
her with all the charms imagination could de- 
vise, or which had been lavished upon her by 
description." 



THE LITERARY LADY 137 

This state of affairs lasted thirty years, at 
the end of which time Colonel Taylor formed 
the desperate resolution of going to Lichfield, 
and seeing his beloved one again. He went, 
he handed the parlour-maid a prosaic card ; and 
while Miss Seward — a stoutish, middle-aged, 
lame lady — was adjusting her cap and ker- 
chief, he strode into the hall, cast one impas- 
sioned glance up the stairway, and rapidly left 
the house. When asked by his wife why he 
had not stayed, he answered solemnly : " The 
gratification must have been followed by pain 
and regret that would have punished the te- 
merity of the attempt. I had no sooner entered 
the house than I became sensible of the per- 
ilous state of my feelings, and fled with pre- 
cipitation." 

And the Swan was fifty-two ! Well may we 
sigh over the days when the Literary Lady 
not only was petted and praised, not only was 
the bulwark of Church and State ; but when 
she accomplished the impossible, and kindled 
in man's inconstant heart an inextinguishable 
flame. 



THE CHILD 

I was not initiated into any rudiments 'till near four years 
of age. — John Evelyn. 

The courage of mothers is proverbial. There 
is no danger which they will not brave in be- 
haK of their offspring. But I have always 
thought that, for sheer foolhardiness, no one 
ever approached the English lady who asked 
Dr. Johnson to read her young daughter's 
translation from Horace. He did read it, be- 
cause the gods provided no escape ; and he told 
his experience to Miss Keynolds, who said 
soothingly, " And how was it, Sir ? " " Why, 
very weU for a young Miss's verses," was the 
contemptuous reply. " That is to say, as com- 
pared with excellence, nothing ; but very well 
for the person who wrote them. I am vexed at 
being shown verses in that manner." 

The fashion of focussing attention upon 
children had not in Dr. Johnson's day assumed 
the fell proportions which, a few years later, 
practically extinguished childhood. It is true 
that he objected to Mr. Bennet Langton's con- 



THE CHILD 139 

nubial felicity, because the children were " too 
much about " ; and that he betrayed an un- 
worthy impatience when the ten little Langtons 
recited fables, or said their alphabets in Hebrew 
for his delectation. It is true also that he an- 
swered with pardonable rudeness when asked 
what was the best way to begin a little boy's 
education. He said it mattered no more how 
it was begun, that is, what the child was 
taught first, than it mattered which of his little 
legs he first thrust into his breeches, — a cal- 
lous speech, painful to parents' ears. Dr. 
Johnson had been dead four years when Mrs. 
Hartley, daughter of Dr. David Hartley of 
Bath, wrote to Sir William Pepys : — 

" Education is the rage of the times. Every- 
body tries to make their children more won- 
derful than any children of their acquaintance. 
The poor little things are so crammed with 
knowledge that there is scant time for them to 
obtain by exercise, and play, and vacancy of 
mind, that strength of body which is much 
more necessary in childhood than learning." 

I am glad this letter went to Sir William, 
who was himseK determined that his children 



140 THE CHILD 

should not, at any rate, be less wonderful than 
other people's bantlings. When his eldest son 
had reached the mature age of six, we find him 
writing to Miss Hannah More and Mrs. Cha- 
pone, asking what books he shall give the poor 
infant to read, and explaining to these august 
ladies his own theories of education. Mrs. 
Chapone, with an enthusiasm worthy of Mrs. 
Blimber, replies that she sympathizes with the 
rare delight it must be to him to teach little 
William Latin ; and that she feels jealous for 
the younger children, who, being yet in the 
nursery, are denied their brother's privileges. 
When the boy is ten. Sir William reads to him 
" The Faerie Queene," and finds that he grasps 
" the beauty of the description and the force 
of the allegory." At eleven he has "an ani- 
mated relish for Ovid and Virgil." And the 
more the happy father has to teU about the 
precocity of his child, the more Mrs. Chapone 
stimulates and confounds him with tales of 
other children's prowess. When she hears that 
the " sweet Boy " is to be introduced, at five, 
to the English classics, she writes at once about 
a little girl, who, when " rather younger than 



THE CHILD 141 

he is" (the bitterness of that!), "had several 
parts of Milton by heart." These "she under- 
stood so well as to apply to her Mother the 
speech of the Elder Brother in ' Comus,' when 
she saw her uneasy for want of a letter from 
the Dean ; and began of her own accord with 

* Peace, Mother, be not over exquisite 
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils '" ; — 

advice which would have exasperated a normal 
parent to the boxing point. 

There were few normal parents left, how- 
ever, at this period, to stem the tide of infantile 
precocity. Child study was dawning as a new 
and fascinating pursuit upon the English world ; 
and the babes of Britain responded nobly to 
the demands made upon their incapacity. Miss 
Anna Seward lisped Milton at three, "recited 
poetical passages, with eyes brimming with de- 
light," at five, and versified her favourite psalms 
at nine. Her father, who viewed these alarming 
symptoms with delight, was so ill-advised as to 
offer her, when she was ten, a whole half-crown, 
if she would write a poem on Spring ; whereupon 
she " swiftly penned " twenty-five lines, which 
have been preserved to an ungrateful world, 



142 THE CHILD 

and whicli shadow forth the painful prolixity of 
future days. At four years of age, little Hannah 
More was already composing verses with omi- 
nous ease. At five, she " struck mute " the 
respected clergyman of the parish by her ex- 
haustive knowledge of the catechism. At eight, 
we are told her talents " were of such a mani- 
festly superior order that her father did not 
scruple to combine with the study of Latin 
some elementary instruction in mathematics ; 
a fact which her readers might very naturally 
infer from the clear and logical cast of her 
argumentative writings." 

It is not altogether easy to trace the connec- 
tion between Miss More's early sums and her 
argumentative writings; but, as an illustration 
of her logical mind, I may venture to quote a 
"characteristic" anecdote, reverently told by 
her biographer, Mr. Thompson. A young lady, 
whose sketches showed an unusual degree of 
talent, was visiting in Bristol; and her work 
was warmly admired by Miss Mary, Miss SaUy, 
Miss Elizabeth, and Miss Patty More. Hannah 
alone withheld all word of commendation, sit- 
ting in stony silence whenever the drawings 



THE CHILD 143 

were produced; until one day she found the 
artist hard at work, putting a new binding on 
a petticoat. Then^ "fixing her brilliant eyes 
with an expression of entire approbation upon 
the girl, she said: 'Now, my dear, that I find you 
can employ yourself usefuUy, I will no longer 
forbear to express my admiration of your draw- 
ings.' " 

Only an early familiarity with the multipli- 
cation table could have made so ruthless a 
logician. 

If Dr. Johnson, being childless, found other 
people's children in his way, how fared the 
bachelors and spinsters who, as time went on, 
were confronted by a host of infant prodigies ; 
who heard little Anna Letitia Aikin — after- 
wards Mrs. Barbauld — read " as well as most 
women" at two and a half years of age; and 
little Anna Maria Porter declaim Shakespeare 
"with precision of emphasis and firmness of 
voice" at five ; and little Alphonso Hayley recite 
a Greek ode at six. We wonder if anybody 
ever went twice to homes that harboured child- 
hood; and we sympathize with Miss Ferrier's 
bitterness of soul, when she describes a family 



144 THE CHILD 

dinner at which Eliza's sampler and Alex- 
ander's copy-book are handed round to the 
guests, and Anthony stands up and repeats 
" My name is Norval " from beginning to end, 
and William Pitt is prevailed upon to sing the 
whole of "God save the King." It was also a 
pleasant fashion of the time to write eulogies 
on one's kith and kin. Sisters celebrated their 
brothers' talents in affectionate verse, and fa- 
thers confided to the world what marvellous 
children they had. Even Dr. Burney, a man 
of sense, poetizes thus on his daughter Susan : — 

Nor did her intellectual powers require 
The usual aid of labour to inspire 
Her soul with prudence, wisdom, and a taste 
Unerring in refinement, sound and chaste. 

This was fortunate for Susan, as most young 
people of the period were compelled to labour 
hard. There was a ghastly pretence on the part 
of parents that children loved their tasks, and 
that to keep them employed was to keep them 
happy. Sir William Pepys persuaded himself 
without much difficulty that little William, w^ho 
had weak eyes and nervous headaches, relished 
Ovid and Virgil. A wonderful and terrible 



THE CHILD 145 

letter written in 1786 by the Baroness de Bode, 
an EngKshwoman married to a German and 
living at Deux-Ponts, lays bare the process by 
which ordinary children were converted into 
the required miracles of precocity. Her eldest 
boys, aged eight and nine, appear to have been 
the principal victims. The business of their 
tutor was to see that they were "fully em- 
ployed," and this is an account of their day. 

" In their walks he [the tutor] teaches them 
natural history and botany, not dryly as a task, 
but practically, which amuses them very much. 
In their hours of study come drawing, writing, 
reading, and summing. Their lesson in writ- 
ing consists of a theme which they are to trans- 
late into three languages, and sometimes into 
Latin, for they learn that a little also. The 
boys learn Latin as a recreation, and not as a 
task, as is the custom in England. Perhaps one 
or two hours a day is at most all that is given 
to that study. 'T is certainly not so dry a study, 
when learnt like modern languages. We have 
bought them the whole of the Classical Authors, 
so that they can instruct themselves if they 
will ; between ninety and a hundred volumes 



146 THE CHILD 

in large octavo. You would be surprised, — 
even Charles Auguste, who is only five, reads 
German well, and French tolerably. They all 
write very good hands, both in Roman and 
German texts. Clem and Harry shall write you 
a letter in English, and send you a specimen 
of their drawing. Harry (the second) writes 
musick, too. He is a charming boy, improves 
very much in aU his studies, plays very prettily 
indeed upon the harpsichord, and plays, too, all 
tunes by ear. Clem will, I think, play well on the 
violin ; but 't is more difficult in the beginning 
than the harpsichord. He is at this moment 
taking his lesson, the master accompanying him 
on the pianoforte ; and when Henry plays that, 
the master accompanies on the violin, which 
forms them both, and pleases them at the same 
time. In the evening their tutor generally re- 
counts to them very minutely some anecdote 
from history, which imprints it on the memory, 
amuses them, and hurts no eyes." 

There is nothing like it on record except the 
rule of life which Frederick William the First 
drew up for little Prince Fritz, when that un- 
fortunate child was nine years old, and which 



THE CHILD 147 

disposed of his day, hour by hour, and minute 
by minute. But then Frederick William — a 
truth-teller if a tyrant — made no idle pretence 
of pleasing and amusing his son. The unpardon- 
able thing about the Baroness de Bode is her 
smiling assurance that one or two hours of 
Latin a day afforded a pleasant pastime for 
children of eight and nine. 

This was, however, the accepted theory of 
education. It is faithfully reflected in all the 
letters and literature of the time. When Miss 
More's redoubtable " Coelebs " asks Lucilla 
Stanley's little sister why she is crowned with 
woodbine, the child replies : " Oh, sir, it is be- 
cause it is my birthday. I am eight years old 
to-day. I gave up all my gilt books with pic- 
tures this day twelvemonth ; and to-day I give 
up all my story-books, and I am now going 
to read such books as men and women read." 
Whereupon the little girl's father — that model 
father whose wisdom flowers into many chap- 
ters of counsel — explains that he makes the 
renouncing of baby books a kind of epoch in 
his daughters' lives ; and that by thus distinctly 
marking the period, he wards off any return to 



148 THE CHILD 

the immature pleasures of childhood. " We have 
in our domestic plan several of these artificial 
divisions of life. These little celebrations are 
eras that we use as marking-posts from which 
we set out on some new course." 

Yet the " gilt books," so ruthlessly discarded 
at eight years of age, were not all of an infan- 
tile character. For half a century these famous 
little volumes, bound in Dutch gilt paper — 
whence their name — found their way into 
every English nursery, and provided amuse- 
ment and instruction for every English child. 
They varied from the " histories " of Goody 
Two-Shoes and Miss Sally SpeUwell to the 
" histories " of Tom Jones and Clarissa Har- 
lowe, " abridged for the amusement of youth " ; 
and from " The Seven Champions of Christen- 
dom" to "The First Principles of Religion, 
and the Existence of a Deity ; Explained in a 
Series of Conversations, Adapted to the Capa- 
city of the Infant Mind." The capacity of the 
infant mind at the close of the eighteenth cen- 
tury must have been something very different 
from the capacity of the infant mind to-day. 
In a gilt-book dialogue (1792) I find a father 



THE CHILD 149 

asking his tiny son : " Dick, have you got ten 
lines of Ovid by heart ? " 

" Yes, Papa, and I 've wrote my exercise." 
" Very well, then, you shall ride with me. 
The boy who does a little at seven years old, 
will do a great deal when he is fourteen." 

This was poor encouragement for Dick, who 
had already tasted the sweets of application. It 
was better worth while for Miss Sally Spell- 
well to reach the perfection which her name 
implies, for she was adopted by a rich old lady 
with a marriageable son, — "a young Gentle- 
man of such purity of Morals and good Under- 
standing as is not everywhere to be found." In 
the breast of this paragon " strange emotions 
arise " at sight of the well-informed orphan ; 
his mother, who sets a proper value on ortho- 
graphy, gives her fuU consent to their union ; 
and we are swept from the contemplation of 
samplers and hornbooks to the triumphant con- 
clusion : "Miss Sally Spellwell now rides in her 
coach and six." Then follows the unmistak- 
able moral : — 

If Virtue, Learning, Goodness are your Aim, 
Each pretty Miss may hope to do the same ; 



150 THE CHILD 

an anticipation which must have spurred many 
a female child to diligence. There was no ill- 
advised questioning of values in our great- 
grandmothers' day to disturb this point of view. 
As the excellent Mrs. West observed in her 
" Letters to a young Lady," a book sanctioned 
by bishops, and dedicated to the Queen : " We 
unquestionably were created to be the wedded 
mates of man. Nature intended that man 
should sue, and woman coyly yield." 

The most appalling thing about the preco- 
cious young people of this period was the ease 
with which they slij)ped into print. Publishers 
were not then the adamantine race whose pro- 
vince it is now to blight the hopes of youth. 
They beamed with benevolence when the first 
fruits of genius were confided to their hands. 
Bishop Thirlwall's first fruits, his " Primitise," 
were published when he was eleven years old, 
with a preface telling the public what a wonder- 
ful boy little Connop was ; — how he studied 
Latin at three, and read Greek with ease and 
fluency at four, and wrote with distinction at 
seven. It is true that the parent Thirlwall ap- 
pears to have paid the costs, to have launched 



THE CHILD 151 

his son's " slender bark " upon seas which 
proved to be stormless. It is true also that the 
bishop suffered acutely in later years from this 
youthful production, and destroyed every copy 
he could find. But there was no proud and 
wealthy father to back young Kichard Pol- 
whele, who managed, when he was a schoolboy 
in Cornwall, to get his first volume of verse 
published anonymously. It was called "The 
Fate of Llewellyn," and was consistently bad, 
though no worse, on the whole, than his ma- 
turer efforts. The title-page stated modestly 
that the writer was " a young gentleman of 
Truro School " ; whereupon an ill-disposed 
critic in the " Monthly Review " intimated that 
the master of Truro School would do well to 
keep his young gentlemen out of print. Dr. 
Cardew, the said master, retorted hotly that 
the book had been published without his know- 
ledge, and evinced a lack of appreciation, which 
makes us fear that his talented pupil had a bad 
half-hour at his hands. 

Miss Anna Maria Porter — she who de- 
lighted " critical audiences " by reciting Shake- 
speare at five — published her " Artless Tales " 



132 THE CHILD 

at fifteen ; and Mrs. Hemans was younger still 
when her " Blossoms of Spring " bloomed 
sweetly upon English soil. Some of the " Blos- 
soms " had been written before she was ten. 
The volume was a " fashionable quarto," was 
dedicated to that hardy annual, the Prince 
Kegent, and appears to have been read by 
adults. It is recorded that an unkind notice 
sent the little girl crying to bed ; but as her 
" England and Spain ; or Valour and Patriot- 
ism" was published nine months later, and 
as at eighteen she " beamed forth with a 
strength and brilliancy that must have shamed 
her reviewer," we cannot feel that her poetic 
development was very seriously retarded. 

And what of the marvellous children whose 
subsequent histories have been lost to the 
world ? What of the two young prodigies of 
Lichfield, " Aonian flowers of early beauty and 
intelligence," who startled Miss Seward and 
her friends by their " shining poetic talents," 
and then lapsed into restful obscurity ? What 
of the wonderful little girl (ten years old) 
whom Miss Bumey saw at Tunbridge Wells ; 
who sang " like an angel," conversed like " an 



THE CHILD 153 

informed, cultivated, and sagacious woman," 
played, danced, acted with all the grace of a 
comedienne, wept tears of emotion without 
disfiguring her pretty face, and, when asked 
if she read the novels of the day (what a ques- 
tion!), replied with a sigh: "But too often! 
I wish I did not." Miss Burney and Mrs. 
Thrale were so impressed — as well they might 
be — by this little Selina Birch, that they 
speculated long and fondly upon the destiny 
reserved for one who so easily eclipsed the 
other miraculous children of this highly 
miraculous age. 

" Doubtful as it is whether we shall ever see 
the sweet Syren again," writes Miss Burney, 
"nothing, as Mrs. Thrale said to her " (this, 
too, was well advised), "can be more certain 
than that we shall hear of her again, let her go 
whither she will. Charmed as we all were, we 
agreed that to have the care of her would be 
distraction. ' She seems the girl in the world,' 
Mrs. Thrale wisely said, ' to attain the highest 
reach of human perfection as a man's mistress. 
As such she would be a second Cleopatra, and 
have the world at her conmiand.' 



154 THE CHILD 

"Poor thing! I Lope to Heaven she will 
escape such sovereignty and such honours ! " 

She did escape scot-free. Whoever married 
— let us hope he married — Miss Birch, was 
no Mark Antony to draw fame to her feet. 
His very name is unknown to the world. Per- 
haps, as "Mrs. — Something — Rogers," she 
illustrated in her respectable middle age that 
beneficent process by which Nature frustrates 
the educator, and converts the infant Cleopatra 
or the infant Hypatia into the rotund matron, 
of whom she stands permanently in need. 



THE EDUCATOR 

The Schoolmaster is abroad. — Lord Bbouqham. 

It is recorded that Boswell once said to Dr. 
Johnson, " If you had had children, would you 
have taught them anything?" and that Dr. 
Johnson, out of the fulness of his wisdom, made 
reply : "I hope that I should have willingly 
lived on bread and water to obtain instruction 
for them ; but I would not have set their 
future friendship to hazard for the sake of 
thrusting into their heads knowledge of things 
for which they might have neither taste nor 
necessity. You teach your daughters the dia- 
meters of the planets, and wonder, when you 
have done it, that they do not delight in your 
company." 

It is the irony of circumstance that Dr. 
Joluison and Charles Lamb should have been 
childless, for they were the two eminent Eng- 
lishmen who, for the best part of a century, 
respected the independence of childhood. They 
were the two eminent Englishmen who could 



156 THE EDUCATOR 

have been trusted to let their children alone. 
Lamb was nine years old when Dr. Johnson 
died. He was twenty-seven when he hurled his 
impotent anathemas at the heads of " the cursed 
Barbauld crew," " blights and blasts of all that 
is human in man and child." By that time the 
educator's hand lay heavy on schoolroom and 
nursery. In France, Kousseau and Mme. de 
Genlis had succeeded in interesting parents so 
profoundly in their children that French babies 
led a vie de parade. Their toilets and their 
meals were as open to the public as were the 
toilets and the meals of royalty. Their bassi- 
nettes appeared in salons, and in private boxes 
at the playhouse ; and it was an inspiring sight 
to behold a French mother fulfilling her sacred 
office while she enjoyed the spectacle on the 
stage. In England, the Edgeworths and Mr. 
Day had projected a system of education which 
isolated children from common currents of life, 
placed them at variance with the accepted 
usages of society, and denied them that whole- 
some neglect which is an important factor in 
self-development. The Edgeworthian child be- 
came the pivot of the household, which revolved 



THE EDUCATOR 157 

warily around him, instructing him whenever 
it had the ghost of a chance, and guarding him 
from the four winds of heaven. He was not 
permitted to remain ignorant upon any subject, 
however remote from his requirements ; but all 
information came filtered through the parental 
mind, so that the one thing he never knew was 
the world of childish beliefs and happenings. 
Intercourse with servants was prohibited ; and 
it is pleasant to record that Miss Edgeworth 
found even Mrs. Barbauld a dangerous guide, 
because little Charles of the " Early Lessons '* 
asks his nurse to dress him in the mornings. 
Such a personal appeal, showing that Charles 
was on speaking terms with the domestics, was 
something which, in Miss Edge worth's opinion, 
no child should ever read ; and she praises the 
solicitude of a mother who blotted out this, and 
aU similar passages, before confiding the book 
to her infant son. He might — who knows? — 
have been so far corrupted as to ask his own 
nurse to button him up the next day. 

Another parent, still more highly commended, 
found something to erase in all her children's 
books ; and Miss Edgeworth describes with 



158 THE EDUCATOR 

grave complacency this pathetic little library, 
scored, blotted, and mutilated, before being 
placed on the nursery shelves. The volmnes 
were, she admits, hopelessly disfigured ; " but 
shall the education of a family be sacrificed to 
the beauty of a page ? Few books can safely 
be given to children without the previous use 
of the pen, the pencil, and the scissors. These, 
in their corrected state, have sometimes a few 
words erased, sometimes half a page. Some- 
times many pages are cut out." 

Even now one feels a pang of pity for the 
little children who, more than a hundred years 
ago, were stopped midway in a story by the 
absence of haK a dozen pages. Even now one 
wonders how much furtive curiosity was awak- 
ened by this process of elimination. To hover 
perpetually on the brink of the concealed and 
the forbidden does not seem a wholesome situa- 
tion ; and a careful perusal of that condemned 
classic, " Bluebeard," might have awakened 
this excellent mother to the risks she ran. 
There can be no heavier handicap to any child 
than a superhumanly wise and watchful cus- 
todian, whether the custody be parental, or 



THE EDUCATOR 159 

relegated to some phoenix of a tutor like Mr. 
Barlow, or that cock-sure experimentalist who 
mounts guard over " Emile," teaching him with 
elaborate artifice the simplest things of life. 
We know how Tommy Merton fell from grace 
when separated from Mr. Barlow ; but what 
would have become of Emile if " Jean Jacques " 
had providentially broken his neck? What 
would have become of little Caroline and Mary 
in Mary WoUstonecraft's " Original Stories," 
if Mrs. Mason — who is Mr. Barlow in petti- 
coats — had ceased for a short time " regulat- 
ing the affections and forming the minds " of 
her helpless charges ? All these young people 
are so scrutinized, directed, and controlled, 
that their personal responsibility has been 
minimized to the danger point. In the name 
of nature, in the name of democracy, in the 
name of morality, they are pushed aside from 
the blessed fellowship of childhood, and from 
the beaten paths of life. 

That Mary Wollstonecraf t should have writ- 
ten the most priggish little book of her day is 
one of those pleasant ironies which relieves the 
tenseness of our pity for her fate. Its publica- 



160 THE EDUCATOR 

tion is the only incident of her life which 
permits the shadow of a smile; and even 
here our amusement is tempered by sympathy 
for the poor innocents who were compelled 
to read the " Original Stories," and to whom 
even Blake's charming illustrations must have 
brought scant relief. The plan of the work is 
one common to most juvenile fiction of the 
period. Carohne and Mary, being motherless, 
are placed under the care of Mrs. Mason, a 
lady of obtrusive wisdom and goodness, who 
shadows their infant lives, moralizes over every 
insignificant episode, and praises herself with 
honest assiduity. If Caroline is afraid of thun- 
derstorms, Mrs. Mason explains that she fears 
no tempest, because " a mind is never truly 
great until the love of virtue overcomes the 
fear of death." If Mary behaves rudely to a 
visitor, Mrs. Mason contrasts her pupil's con- 
duct with her own. " I have accustomed my- 
self to think of others, and what they will 
suffer on all occasions," she observes; "and 
this loathness to offend, or even to hurt the 
feelings of another, is an instantaneous spring 
which actuates my conduct, and makes me 



THE EDUCATOR 161 

kindly affected to everything that breathes. 
. . . Perhaps the greatest pleasure I have ever 
received has arisen from the habitual exercise 
of charity in its various branches." 

The stories with which this monitress illus- 
trates her precepts are drawn from the edify- 
ing annals of the neighbourhood, which is rich 
in examples of vice and virtue. On the one 
hand we have the pious Mrs. Trueman, the 
curate's wife, who lives in a rose-covered cot- 
tage, furnished with books and musical instru- 
ments ; and on the other, we have "the profli- 
gate Lord Sly," and Miss Jane Fretful, who 
begins by kicking the furniture when she is in 
a temper, and ends by alienating all her friends 
(including her doctor), and dying unloved and 
unlamented. How far her mother should be 
held responsible for this excess of peevishness, 
when she rashly married a gentleman named 
Fretful, is not made clear; but all the char- 
acters in the book live nobly, or ignobly, up 
to their patronymics. When Mary neglects to 
wash her face — apparently that was all she 
ever washed — or brush her teeth in the morn- 
ings, Mrs. Mason for some time only hints her 



162 THE EDUCATOR 

displeasure, " not wishing to burden her with 
precepts"; and waits for a "glaring example" 
to show the little girl the unloveliness of per- 
manent dirt. This example is soon afforded 
by Mrs. Dowdy, who comes opportunely to 
visit them, and whose reluctance to perform 
even the simple ablutions common to the period 
is as resolute as Slovenly Peter's. 

In the matter of tuition, Mrs. Mason is 
comparatively lenient. Caroline and Mary, 
though warned that " idleness must always be 
intolerable, because it is only an irksome con- 
sciousness of existence " (words which happily 
have no meaning for childhood), are, on the 
whole, less saturated with knowledge than 
Miss Edgeworth's Harry and Lucy; and 
Harry and Lucy lead rollicking lives by con- 
trast with " Edwin and Henry," or " Anna 
and Louisa," or any other little pair of heroes 
and heroines. Edwin and Henry are particu- 
larly ill used, for they are supposed to be en- 
joying a holiday with their father, " the worthy 
Mr. Friendly," who makes "every domestic 
incident, the vegetable world, sickness and 
death, a real source of instruction to his be- 



THE EDUCATOR 163 

loved offspring." How glad those boys must 
have been to get back to school ! Yet they 
court disaster by asking so many questions. 
All the children in our great-grandmothers' 
story-books ask questions. All lay themselves 
open to attack. If they drink a cup of choc- 
olate, they want to know what it is made of, 
and where cocoanuts grow. If they have a pud- 
ding for dinner, they are far more eager to 
learn about sago and the East Indies than to 
eat it. They put intelligent queries concerning 
the slave-trade, and make remarks that might 
be quoted in Parliament ; yet they are as ignor- 
ant of the common things of life as though 
new-born into the world. In a book called 
"Summer Kambles, or Conversations Instruct- 
ive and Amusing, for the Use of Children," 
published in 1801, a little girl says to her 
mother: "Vegetables? I do not know what 
they are. Will you tell me?" And the mother 
graciously responds: "Yes, with a great deal 
of pleasure. Peas, beans, potatoes, carrots, tur- 
nips, and cabbages are vegetables." 

At least the good lady's information was 
correct as far as it went, which was not always 



164 THE EDUCATOR 

the case. The talented governess in "Little 
Truths" warns her pupils not to swallow 
young frogs out of bravado, lest perchance 
they should mistake and swallow a toad, which 
would poison them; and in a "History of 
Birds and Beasts," intended for very young 
children, we find, underneath a woodcut of a 
porcupine, this unwarranted and irrelevant as- 
sertion : — 

This creature shoots his pointed quills, 

And beasts destroys, and men ; 
But more the ravenous lawyer kills 

With his half -quill, the pen. 

It was thus that natural history was taught in 
the year 1767. 

The publication in 1798 of Mr. Edgeworth's 
"Practical Education" (Miss Edgeworth was 
responsible for some of the chapters) gave a 
profound impetus to child-study. Little boys 
and girls were dragged from the obscure haven 
of the nursery, from their hornbooks, and the 
casual slappings of nursery-maids, to be taught 
and tested in the light of day. The process ap- 
pears to have been deeply engrossing. Irregu- 
lar instruction, object lessons, and experimental 



THE EDUCATOR 165 

play afforded scant respite to parent or to child. 
" Square and circular bits of wood, balls, cubes, 
and triangles " were Mr. Edgeworth's first 
substitutes for toys; to be followed by "card, 
pasteboard, substantial but not sharp-pointed 
scissors, wire, gum, and wax." It took an 
active mother to superintend this home kinder- 
garten, to see that the baby did not poke the 
triangle into its eye, and to relieve Tommy at 
intervals from his coating of gum and wax. 
When we read further that "children are very 
fond of attempting experiments in dyeing, and 
are very curious about vegetable dyes," we 
gain a fearful insight into parental pleasures 
and responsibilities a hundred years ago. 

Text-book knowledge was frowned upon by 
the Edgeworths. We know how the "good 
French governess " laughs at her clever pupil 
who has studied the " Tablet of Memory," and 
who can say when potatoes were first brought 
into England, and when hair powder was first 
used, and when the first white paper was made. 
The new theory of education banished the 
" Tablet of Memory," and made it incumbent 
upon parent or teacher to impart in conversa- 



166 THE EDUCATOR 

tion such facts concerning potatoes, powder, 
and paper as she desired her pupils to know. 
If books were used, they were of the deceptive 
order, which purposed to be friendly and enter- 
taining. A London bookseller actually pro- 
posed to Godwin " a delightful work for 
children," which was to be called " A Tour 
through Papa's House." The object of this 
precious volume was to explain casually how 
and where Papa's furniture was made, his car- 
pets were woven, his curtains dyed, his kitchen 
pots and pans called into existence. Even God- 
win, who was not a bubbling fountain of hu- 
mour, saw the absurdity of such a book; and 
recommended in its place " Eobinson Crusoe," 
"if weeded of its Methodism" (alas! poor 
Eobinson!), "The Seven Champions of Chris- 
tendom," and " The Arabian Nights." 

The one great obstacle in the educator's 
path (it has not yet been wholly levelled) was 
the proper apportioning of knowledge between 
boys and girls. It was hard to speed the male 
child up the stony heights of erudition ; but it 
was harder still to check the female child at 
the crucial point, and keep her tottering decor- 



THE EDUCATOR 167 

ously behind her brother. In 1774 a few rash 
innovators conceived the project of an advanced 
school for girls ; one that should approach from 
afar a college standard, and teach with thor- 
oughness what it taught at all ; one that might 
be trusted to broaden the intelligence of 
women, without lessening their much-prized 
femininity. It was even proposed that Mrs. 
Barbauld, who was esteemed a very learned 
lady, should take charge of such an establish- 
ment ; but the plan met with no approbation 
at her hands. In the first place she held that 
fifteen was not an age for school-life and study, 
because then "the empire of the passions is 
coming on " ; and in the second place there was 
nothing she so strongly discountenanced as 
thoroughness in a girl's education. On this 
point she had no doubts, and no reserves. 
"Young ladies," she wrote, "ought to have 
only such a general tincture of knowledge as 
to make them agreeable companions to a man 
of sense, and to enable them to find rational 
entertainment for a solitary hour. They should 
gain these accomplishments in a quiet and un- 
observed manner. The thefts of knowledge in 



168 THE EDUCATOR 

our sex are connived at, only wliile carefully 
concealed ; and, if displayed, are punished with 
disgrace. The best way for women to acquire 
knowledge is from conversation with a father, 
a brother, or a friend ; and by such a course of 
reading as they may recommend." 

There was no danger that an education con- 
ducted on these lines would result in an undue 
development of intelligence, would lift the 
young lady above "her own mild and chas- 
tened sphere." In justice to Mrs. Barbauld we 
must admit that she but echoed the sentiments 
of her day. " Girls," said Miss Hannah More, 
"should be led to distrust their own judg- 
ments." They should be taught to give up their 
opinions, and to avoid disputes, " even if they 
know they are right." The one fact impressed 
upon the female child was her secondary place 
in the scheme of creation ; the one virtue she 
was taught to affect was delicacy ; the one vice 
permitted to her weakness was dissimulation. 
Even her play was not like her brother's play, 
— a reckless abandonment to high spirits ; it 
was play within the conscious limits of pro- 
priety. In one of Mrs. Trimmer's books, a 



THE EDUCATOR 169 

model mother hesitates to allow her eleven- 
year-old daughter to climb three rounds of a 
ladder, and look into a robin's nest, four feet 
from the ground. It was not a genteel thing 
for a little girl to do. Even her schoolbooks 
were not like her brother's schoolbooks. They 
were carefully adapted to her limitations. Mr. 
Thomas Gisborne, who wrote a much-admired 
work entitled " An Enquiry into the Duties of 
the Female Sex," was of the opinion that geo- 
graphy might be taught to girls without re- 
serve ; but that they should learn only " select 
parts" of natural history, and, in the way of 
science, only a few "popular and amusing 
facts." A "Young Lady's Guide to Astron- 
omy " was something vastly different from the 
comprehensive system imparted to her brother. 
In a very able and subtle little book called 
" A Father's Legacy to his Daughters," by Dr. 
John Gregory of Edinburgh, — 

He whom each virtue fired, each grace refined, 
Friend, teacher, pattern, darling of mankind ! ^ 

— we find much earnest counsel on this subject. 
Dr. Gregory was an affectionate parent. He 

^ Beattie's Minstrel. 



170 THE EDUCATOR 

grudged his daughters no material and no in- 
tellectual advantage; but he was well aware 
that by too great liberality he imperilled their 
worldly prospects. Therefore, although he de- 
sired them to be well read and well informed, 
he bade them never to betray their knowledge 
to the world. Therefore, although he desired 
them to be strong and vigorous, — to walk, to 
ride, to live much in the open air, — he bade 
them never to make a boast of their endur- 
ance. Rude health, no less than scholarship, 
was the exclusive prerogative of men. His 
deliberate purpose was to make them rational 
creatures, taking clear and temperate views of 
life; but he warned them all the more ear- 
nestly against the dangerous indulgence of 
seeming wiser than their neighbours. " Be 
even cautious in displaying your good sense," 
writes this astute and anxious father. " It will 
be thought you assume a superiority over the 
rest of your company. But if you happen to 
have any learning, keep it a profound secret, 
especially from men, who are apt to look with 
a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of 
great parts and cultivated understanding." 



THE EDUCATOR 171 

This is plain speaking. And it must be re- 
membered that "learning" was not in 1774, 
nor for many years afterwards, the compre- 
hensive word it is to-day. A young lady who 
could translate a page of Cicero was held to 
be learned to the point of pedantry. What 
reader of " Coelebs " — if "Ccelebs " still boasts 
a reader — can forget that agitating moment 
when, through the inadvertence of a child, it 
is revealed to the breakfast table that Lucilla 
Stanley studies Latin every morning with her 
father. Overpowered by the intelligence, Coelebs 
casts " a timid eye " upon his mistress, who is 
covered with confusion. She puts the sugar 
into the cream jug, and the tea into the sugar 
basin ; and finally, unable to bear the mingled 
awe and admiration awakened by this disclos- 
ure of her scholarship, she slips out of the 
room, followed by her younger sister, and com- 
miserated by her father, who knows what a 
shock her native delicacy has received. Had 
the fair Lucilla admitted herself to be an ex- 
pert tight-rope dancer, she could hardly have 
created more consternation. 

No wonder Dr. Gregory counselled his daugh- 



172 THE EDUCATOR 

ters to silence. Lovers less generous than 
Coelebs might well have been alienated by such 
disqualifications. " Oh, how lovely is a maid's 
ignorance ! " sighs Rousseau, contemplating 
with rapture the many things that Sophie does 
not know. " Happy the man who is destined 
to teach her. She will never aspire to be the 
tutor of her husband, but will be content to 
remain his pupil. She will not endeavour to 
mould his tastes, but will relinquish her own. 
She will be more estimable to him than if she 
were learned. It will be his pleasure to en- 
lighten her." 

This was a well-established point of view, 
and English Sophies were trained to meet it 
with becoming deference. They heard no idle 
prating about an equality which has never 
existed, and which never can exist. " Had a 
third order been necessary," said an eighteenth- 
century schoolmistress to her pupils, " doubt- 
less one would have been created, a midway 
kind of being." In default of such a connect- 
ing link, any impious attempt to bridge the 
chasm between the sexes met with the failure 
it deserved. When Mrs. Knowles, a Quaker 



THE EDUCATOR 173 

lady, not destitute of self-esteem, observed to 
Boswell that she hoped men and women would 
be equal in another world, that gentleman re- 
plied with spirit : " Madam, you are too am- 
bitious. We might as well desire to be equal 
with the angels." 

The dissimulation which Dr. Gregory urged 
upon his daughters, and which is the safe- 
guard of all misplaced intelligence, extended to 
matters more vital than Latin and astronomy. 
He warned them, as they valued their earthly 
happiness, never to make a confidante of a 
married woman, " especially if she lives happily 
with her husband " ; and never to reveal to 
their own husbands the excess of their wifely 
affection. " Do not discover to any man the 
full extent of your love, no, not although you 
marry him. That sufficiently shows your pre- 
ference, which is all he is entitled to know. If 
he has delicacy, he will ask for no stronger 
proof of your affection, for your sake; if he 
has sense, he will not ask it, for his own. Vio- 
lent love cannot subsist, at least cannot be 
expressed, for any time together on both sides. 
Nature in this case has laid the reserve on 



174 THE EDUCATOR 

you." In the passivity of women, no less than 
in their refined duplicity, did this acute ob- 
server recognize the secret strength of sex. 

A vastly different counsellor of youth was 
Mrs. West, who wrote a volume of " Letters 
to a Young Lady " (the young lady was Miss 
Maunsell, and she died after reading them), 
which were held to embody the soundest mo- 
rality of the day. Mrs. West is as duU as Dr. 
Gregory is penetrating, as verbose as he is 
laconic, as obvious as he is individual. She 
devotes many agitated pages to theology, and 
many more to irrefutable, though one hopes 
unnecessary, arguments in behalf of female 
virtue. But she also advises a careful submis- 
sion, a belittling insincerity, as woman's best 
safeguards in life. It is not only a wife's duty 
to tolerate her husband's foUies, but it is the 
part of wisdom to conceal from him any know- 
ledge of his derelictions. Bad he may be ; but 
it is necessary to his comfort to believe that 
his wife thinks him good. " The lordly nature 
of man so strongly revolts from the suspicion 
of inferiority," explains this excellent monitress, 
"that a susceptible husband can never feel 



THE EDUCATOR 175 

easy in the society of his wife when he knows 
that she is acquainted with his vices, though 
he is well assured that her prudence, gener- 
osity, and affection will prevent her from be- 
ing a severe accuser." One is reminded of the 
old French gentleman who said he was aware 
that he cheated at cards, but he disliked any 
allusion to the subject. 

To be "easy" in a wife's society, to relax 
spiritually as well as mentally, and to be im- 
mune from criticism ; — these were the privi- 
leges which men demanded, and which well- 
trained women were ready to accord. In 1808 
the " Belle Assemblee " printed a model letter, 
which purported to come from a young wife 
whose husband had deserted her and her child 
for the more lively society of his mistress. It 
expressed in pathetic language the sentiments 
then deemed correct, — sentiments which em- 
bodied the patience of Griselda, without her 
acquiescence in fate. The wife tells her husband 
that she has retired to the country for economy, 
and to avoid scandalous gossip ; that by care- 
ful management she is able to live on the pit- 
tance he has given her; that "little Emily" is 



176 THE EDUCATOR 

working a pair of ruffles for him; that his 
presence would make their poor cottage seem 
a palace. " Pardon my interrupting you," she 
winds up with ostentatious meekness. '' I mean 
to give you satisfaction. Though I am deeply 
wronged by your error, I am not resentful. I 
wish you all the happiness of which you are 
capable, and am your once loved and still 
affectionate, Emilia." 

That last sentence is not without dignity, 
and certainly not without its sting. One doubts 
whether Emilia's husband, for all her promises 
and protestations, could ever again have felt 
perfectly "easy" in his wife's society. He 
probably therefore stayed away, and soothed 
his soul elsewhere. " We can with tranquillity 
forgive in ourselves the sins of which no one 



THE PIETIST 

They go the fairest way to Heaven that would serve God 
without a Hell. — Meligio Medici. 

" How cutting it is to be the means of bringing 
children into the world to be the subjects of 
the Kingdom of Darkness, to dweU with Divils 
and Damned Spirits." 

In this temper of pardonable regret the 
mother of William Godwin wrote to her erring 
son ; and while the maternal point of view 
deserves consideration (no parent could be 
expected to relish such a prospect), the letter 
is noteworthy as being one of the few written 
to Godwin, or about Godwin, which forces us to 
sympathize with the philosopher. The boy who 
was reproved for picking up the family cat on 
Sunday — "demeaning myself with such pro- 
faneness on the Lord's day" — was little likely 
to find his religion "aU pure profit." His ac- 
count of the books he read as a child, and of 
his precocious and unctuous piety, is probably 
over-emphasized for the sake of colour ; but the 



178 THE PIETIST 

Evangelical literature of his day, whether de- 
signed for young people or for adults, was of 
a melancholy and discouraging character. The 
" Pious Deaths of Many Godly Children" (sad 
monitor of the Godwin nursery) appears to 
have been read off the face of the earth ; but 
there have descended to us sundry volumes of 
a like character, which even now stab us with 
pity for the little readers long since laid in 
their graves. The most frivolous occupation of 
the good boy in these old story-books is search- 
ing the Bible, " with mamma's permission," for 
texts in which David "praises God for the 
weather." More serious-minded children weep 
floods of tears because they are " lost sinners." 
In a book of " Sermons for the Very Young," 
published by the Vicar of Walthamstow in the 
beginning of the last century, we find the fall 
of Sodom and Gomorrah selected as an appro- 
priate theme for infancy, and its lessons driven 
home with all the force of a direct personal 
application. " Think, little child, of the fearful 
story. The wrath of God is upon them. Do 
they now repent of their sins ? It is all too 
late. Do they cry for mercy ? There is none to 



THE PIETIST 179 

hear them. . . . Your heart, little child, is fuU 
of sin. You think of what is not right, and 
then you wish it, and that is sin. . . . Ah, 
what shall sinners do when the last day comes 
upon them ? What will they think when God 
shall punish them forever ? " 

Children brought up on these lines passed 
swiftly from one form of hysteria to another, 
from self -exaltation and the assurance of grace 
to fears which had no easement. There is no- 
thing more terrible in literature than Sorrow's 
account of the Welsh preacher who believed 
that when he was a child of seven he had com- 
mitted the unpardonable sin, and whose whole 
life was shadowed by fear. At the same time 
that little WiUiam Godwin was composing 
beautiful death-bed speeches for the possible 
edification of his parents and neighbours, we 
find Miss Ehzabeth Carter writing to Mrs. 
Montagu about her own nephew, who realized, 
at seven years of age, how much he and all 
creatures stood in need of pardon ; and who, 
being ill, pitifully entreated his father to pray 
that his sins might be forgiven. Commenting 
upon which incident, the reverent Montagu 



180 THE PIETIST 

Pennington, who edited Miss Carter's letters, 
bids us remember that it reflects more credit 
on the parents who brought their child up with 
so just a sense of religion than it does on the 
poor infant himself. " Innocence," says the in- 
flexible Mr. Stanley, in " Coelebs in Search of 
a Wife," " can never be pleaded as a ground of 
acceptance, because the thing does not exist." 

With the dawning of the nineteenth century 
came the controversial novel; and to under- 
stand its popularity we have but to glance at 
the books which preceded it, and compared to 
which it presented an animated and contentious 
aspect. One must needs have read " Elements 
of Morality " at ten, and " Strictures on Fe- 
male Education " at fifteen, to be able to relish 
"Father Clement" at twenty. Sedate young 
women, whose lightest available literature was 
" Coelebs," or " Hints towards forming the 
Character of a Princess," and who had been 
presented on successive birthdays with Mrs. 
Chapone's " Letters on the Improvement of the 
Mind," and Mrs. West's " Letters to a Young 
Lady," and Miss Hamilton's " Letters to the 
Daughter of a Nobleman," found a natural re- 



THE PIETIST 181 

lief in studying the dangers of dissent, or the 
secret machinations of the Jesuits. Many a dull 
hour was quickened into pleasurable apprehen- 
sion of Jesuitical intrigues, from the days when 
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, stoutly refused 
to take cinchona — a form of quinine — be- 
cause it was then known as Jesuit's bark, and 
might be trusted to poison a British constitu- 
tion, to the days when Sir William Pepys wrote 
in aU seriousness to Hannah More : " You sur- 
prise me by saying that your good Archbishop 
has been in danger from the Jesuits ; but I be- 
lieve they are concealed in places where they 
are less likely to be found than in Ireland." 

Just what they were going to do to the good 
Archbishop does not appear, for Sir William 
at this point abruptly abandons the prelate to 
tell the story of a Norwich butcher, who for 
some mysterious and unexplained reason was 
hiding from the inquisitors of Lisbon. No dig- 
nitary was too high, no orphan child too low to 
be the objects of a Popish plot. Miss Carter 
writes to Mrs. Montagu, in 1775, about a little 
foundling whom Mrs. Chapone had placed at 
service with some country neighbours. 



18^ THE PIETIST 

" She behaves very prettily, and with great 
affection to the people with whom she is living," 
says Miss Carter. "One of the reasons she 
assigns for her fondness is that they give her 
enough food, which she represents as a deficient 
article in the workhouse ; and says that on Fri- 
days particularly she never had any dinner. 
Surely the parish officers have not made a 
Papist the mistress! If this is not the case, 
the loss of one dinner in a week is of no great 
consequence." 

To the poor hungry child it was probably of 
much greater consequence than the theological 
bias of the matron. Nor does a dinnerless Friday 
appear the surest way to win youthful converts 
to the fold. But devout ladies who had read 
Canon Seward's celebrated tract on the " Com- 
parison between Paganism and Popery" (in 
which he found little to choose between them) 
were well on their guard against the insidious 
advances of Rome. "When I had no religion 
at aU," confesses Cowper to Lady Hesketh, " I 
had yet a terrible dread of the Pope." The 
worst to be apprehended from Methodists was 
their lamentable tendency to enthusiasm, and 



THE PIETIST 183 

their ill-advised meddling with the poor. It is 
true that a farmer of Cheddar told Miss Patty- 
More that a Methodist minister had once 
preached under his mother's best apple tree, and 
that the sensitive tree had never borne another 
apple ; but this was an extreme case. The Ched- 
dar vestry resolved to protect their orchards 
from blight by stoning the next preacher who 
invaded the parish, and their example was fol- 
lowed with more or less fervour throughout 
England. In a quiet letter written from Margate 
(1768), by the Rev. John Lyon, we find this 
casual allusion to the process : — 

" We had a Methodist preacher hold forth 
last night. I came home just as he had finished. 
I believe the poor man fared badly, for I saw, 
as I passed, eggs, stones, etc., fly pretty thick." 

It was all in the day's work. The Rev. Lyon, 
who was a scholar and an antiquarian, and who 
wrote an exhaustive history of Dover, had no 
further interest in matters obviously aloof from 
his consideration. 

This simple and robust treatment, so quiet- 
ing to the nerves of the practitioners, was un- 
serviceable for Papists, who did not preach in 



184 THE PIETIST 

the open ; and a great deal of suppressed irri- 
tation found no better outlet than print. It 
appears to have been a difficult matter in those 
days to write upon any subject without revert- 
ing sooner or later to the misdeeds of Rome, 
Miss Seward pauses in her praise of Blair's 
sermons to lament the " boastful egotism " of 
St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who seems tolerably 
remote; and Mr. John Dyer, when wrapped 
in peaceful contemplation of the British wool- 
market, suddenly and fervently denounces the 
" black clouds " of bigotry, and the " fiery bolts 
of superstition," which lay desolate " Papal 
realms." In vain Mr. Edgeworth, stooping from 
his high estate, counselled serenity of mind, and 
that calm tolerance born of a godlike certitude ; 
in vain he urged the benignant attitude of in- 
fallibility. " The absurdities of Popery are so 
manifest," he wrote, " that to be hated they 
need but to be seen. But for the peace and 
prosperity of this country, the misguided Cath- 
olic should not be rendered odious ; he should 
rather be pointed out as an object of compas- 
sion. His ignorance should not be imputed to 
him as a crime ; nor should it be presupposed 



THE PIETIST 185 

that his life cannot be right, whose tenets are 
erroneous. Thank God that I am a Protestant ! 
should be a mental thanksgiving, not a public 
taunt." 

Mr. Edgeworth was nearly seventy when 
the famous " Protestant's Manual ; or. Papacy 
Unveiled " (endeared forever to our hearts by 
its association with Mrs. Varden and Miggs), 
bowled over these pleasant and peaceful argu- 
ments. There was no mawkish charity about 
the " Manual," which made its way into every 
corner of England, stood for twenty years on 
thousands of British book-shelves, and was 
given as a reward to children so unfortunate 
as to be meritorious. It sold for a shilling (nine 
shillings a dozen when purchased for distribu- 
tion), so Mrs. Varden's two post-octavo volumes 
must have been a special edition. Reviewers 
recommended it earnestly to parents and teach- 
ers ; and it was deemed indispensable to all 
who desired " to preserve the rising generation 
from the wiles of Papacy and the snares of 
priestcraft. They will be rendered sensible of 
the evils and probable consequences of Catholic 
emancipation ; and be confirmed in those opin- 



186 THE PIETIST 

ions, civil, political, and religious, which have 
hitherto constituted the happiness and formed 
the strength of their native country." 

This was a strong appeal. A universal un- 
easiness prevailed, manifesting itself in hostility 
to innovations, however innocent and orthodox. 
Miss Hannah More's Sunday Schools were 
stoutly opposed, as savouring of Methodism (a 
religion she disliked), and of radicalism, for 
which she had all the natural horror of a well- 
to-do, middle-class Christian. Even Mrs. West, 
an oppressively pious writer, misdoubted the 
influence of Sunday Schools, for the simple 
reason that it was difficult to keep the lower 
orders from learning more than was good for 
them. "Hard toil and humble diligence are 
indispensably needful to the community," said 
this excellent lady. " Writing and accounts 
appear superfluous instructions in the humblest 
walks of life ; and, when imparted to servants, 
have the general effect of making them am- 
bitious, and disgusted with the servile offices 
which they are required to perform." 

Humility was a virtue consecrated to the 
poor, to the rural poor especially ; and what 



THE PIETIST 187 

with Methodism on the one hand, and the jar- 
ring echoes of the French Revolution on the 
other, the British ploughman was obviously 
growing less humble every day. Crabbe, who 
cherished no illusions, painted him in colours 
grim enough to fill the reader with despair ; 
but Miss More entertained a feminine convic- 
tion that Bibles and flannel waistcoats fulfilled 
his earthly needs. In all her stories and tracts 
the villagers are as artificial as the happy peas- 
antry of an old-fashioned opera. They group 
themselves deferentially around the squire and 
the rector ; they wear costumes of uncompro- 
mising rusticity ; and they sing a chorus of 
praise to the kind young ladies who have 
brought them a bowl of soup. It is curious to 
turn from this atmosphere of abasement, from 
perpetual curtsies and the lowliest of lowly 
virtues, to the journal of the painter Haydon, 
who was a sincerely pious man, yet who can- 
not restrain his wonder and admiration at see- 
ing the Duke of Wellington behave respectfully 
in church. That a person so august should 
stand when the congregation stood, and kneel 
when the congregation knelt, seemed to Hay- 



188 THE PIETIST 

don an immense condescension. " Here was the 
greatest hero in the world," he writes ecstatic- 
ally, " who had conquered the greatest genius, 
prostrating his heart and being before his God 
in his venerable age, and praying for His 
mercy." 

It is the most naVve impression on record. 
That the Duke and the Duke's scullion might 
perchance stand equidistant from the Almighty 
was an idea which failed to present itself to 
Haydon's ardent mind. 

The pious fiction put forward in the interest 
of dissent was more impressive, more emotional, 
more belligerent, and, in some odd way, more 
human than " Ccelebs," or " The Shepherd of 
Salisbury Plain." Miss Grace Kennedy's stories 
are as absurd as Miss More's, and — though 
the thing may sound incredible — much duller ; 
but they give one an impression of painful 
earnestness, and of that heavy atmosphere en- 
gendered by too close a contemplation of Hell. 
A pious Christian lady, with local standards, a 
narrow intelligence, and a comprehensive ignor- 
ance of life, is not by election a novelist. Nei- 
ther do polemics lend themselves with elasticity 



THE PIETIST 189 

to the varying demands of fiction. There are, 
in fact, few things less calculated to instruct 
the intellect or to enlarge the heart than the 
perusal of controversial novels. 

But Miss Kennedy had at least the striking 
quality of temerity. She was not afraid of be- 
ing ridiculous. She was undaunted in her ig- 
norance. And she was on fire with all the bitter 
ardour of the separatist. Miss More, on the 
contrary, entertained a judicial mistrust for 
fervour, fanaticism, the rush of ardent hopes 
and fears and transports, for all those vehe- 
ment emotions which are apt to be disconcert- 
ing to ladies of settled views and incomes. 
Her model Christian, Candidus, " avoids en- 
thusiasm as naturally as a wise man avoids 
folly, or as a sober man shuns extravagance. 
He laments when he encounters a real enthus- 
iast, because he knows that, even if honest, he 
is pernicious." In the same guarded spirit, 
Mrs. Montagu praises the benevolence of Lady 
Bab Montagu and Mrs. Scott, who had the 
village girls taught plain sewing and the cate- 
chism. " These good works are often performed 
by the Methodist ladies in the heat of enthus- 



190 THE PIETIST 

iasm ; but, thank God ! my sister's is a calm 
and rational piety." " Surtout point de zele," 
was the dignified motto of the day. 

There is none of this chiU sobriety about 
Miss Kennedy's Bible Christians, who, a hun- 
dred years ago, preached to a listening world. 
They are aflame with a zeal which knows no 
doubts and recognizes no forbearance. Their 
methods are akin to those of the irrepressible 

Miss J , who undertook, Bible in hand, 

the conversion of that pious gentleman, the 
Duke of Wellington ; or of Miss Lewis, who 
went to Constantinople to convert that equally 
pious gentleman, the Sultan. Miss Kennedy's 
heroes and heroines stand ready to convert the 
world. They would delight in expounding the 
Scriptures to the Pope and the Patriarch of 
Constantinople. Controversy affords their only 
conversation. Dogma of the most unrelenting 
kind is their only food for thought. Piety pro- 
vides their only avenue for emotions. Elderly 
bankers weep profusely over their beloved pas- 
tor's eloquence, and fashionable ladies melt into 
tears at the inspiring sight of a village Sunday 
School. Young gentlemen, when off on a holi- 



THE PIETIST 191 

day, take with them "no companion but a 
Bible " ; and the lowest reach of worldliness is 
laid bare when an unconverted mother asks 
her daughter if she can sing something more 
cheerful than a hymn. Conformity to the 
Church of England is denounced with unspar- 
ing warmth ; and the Church of Rome is hon- 
oured by having a whole novel, the once famous 
"Father Clement," devoted to its permanent 
downfall. 

Dr. Greenhill, who has written a sympa- 
thetic notice of Miss Kennedy in the " Dic- 
tionary of National Biography," considers that 
"Father Clement" was composed "with an 
evident wish to state fairly the doctrines and 
practices of the Roman Catholic Church, even 
while the authoress strongly disapproves of 
them"; — a point of view which compels us 
to believe that the biographer spared himself 
(and who shall blame him ?) the reading of this 
melancholy tale. That George Eliot, who spared 
herself nothing, was well acquainted with its 
context, is evidenced by the conversation of 
the ladies who, in " Janet's Repentance," meet 
to cover and label the books of the Paddiford 



192 THE PIETIST 

Lending Library. Miss Pratt, the autocrat of 
the circle, observes that the story of " Father 
Clement " is, in itself, a library on the errors 
of Romanism, whereupon old Mrs. Linnet very 
sensibly replies : " One 'ud think there did n't 
want much to drive people away from a reli- 
gion as makes 'em walk barefoot over stone 
floors, like that girl in ' Father Clement,' send- 
ing the blood up to the head frightful. Any- 
body might see that was an unnat'ral creed." 

So they might ; and a more unnatural creed 
than Father Clement's Catholicism was never 
devised for the extinction of man's flickering 
reason. Only the mental debility of the Claren- 
ham family can account for their holding such 
views long enough to admit of their being con- 
verted from them by the Montagus. Only the 
militant spirit of the Clarenham chaplain and 
the Montagu chaplain makes possible several 
hundred pages of polemics. Montagu Bibles 
run the blockade, are discovered in the hands 
of truth-seeking Clarenhams, and are hurled 
back upon the spiritual assailants. The deter- 
mination of Father Dennis that the Scriptures 
shaU be quoted in Latin only (a practice which 



THE PIETIST 193 

is scholarly but inconvenient), and the deter- 
mination of Edward Montagu " not to speak 
Latin in the presence of ladies," embarrass 
social intercourse. Catherine Clarenham, the 
young person who walks barefooted over stone 
floors, has been so blighted by this pious exer- 
cise that she cannot, at twenty, translate the 
Pater Noster or Ave Maria into English, and 
remains a melancholy illustration of Latinity. 
When young Basil Clarenham shows symptoms 
of yielding to Montagu arguments, and begins 
to want a Bible of his own, he is spirited away 
to Rome, and confined in a monastery of the 
Inquisition, where he spends his time reading 
*' books forbidden by the Inquisitors," and espe- 
cially "a New Testament with the prohibitory 
mark of the Holy Office upon it," which the 
weak-minded monks have amiably placed at his 
disposal. Indeed, the monastery library, to which 
the captive is made kindly welcome, seems to 
have been weU stocked with interdicted litera- 
ture ; and, after browsing in these pastures for 
several tranquil months, Basil teUs his aston- 
ished hosts that their books have taught him 
that " the Romish Church is the most corrupt 



194 THE PIETIST 

of all churches professing Christianity." Hav- 
ing accomplished this unexpected but happy 
result, the Inquisition exacts from him a sol- 
emn vow that he will never reveal its secrets, 
and sends him back to England, where he loses 
no time in becoming an excellent Protestant. 
His sister Maria follows his example (her vir- 
tues have pointed steadfastly to this conclu- 
sion) ; but Catherine enters a convent, full of 
stone floors and idolatrous images, where she 
becomes a "tool" of the Jesuits, and says her 
prayers in Latin until she dies. 

No wonder " Father Clement " went through 
twelve editions, and made its authoress as fa- 
mous in her day as the authoress of "Elsie 
Dinsmore " is in ours. No wonder the Paddi- 
ford Lending Library revered its sterling worth. 
And no wonder it provoked from Catholics re- 
prisals which Dr. GreenhiU stigmatizes as "flip- 
pant." To-day it lives by virtue of half a dozen 
mocking lines in George Eliot's least-read story : 
but for a hundred years its progeny has infested 
the earth, — a crooked progeny, like Peer Gynt's, 
which can never be straightened into sincerity, 
or softened into good-will. " For first the Church 



THE PIETIST 196 

of Kome condemneth us, we likewise them," ob- 
serves Sir Thomas Browne with equanimity; 
" and thus we go to Heaven against each others' 
wills, conceits, and opinions." 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

Why, by dabbling in those accursed Annuals, I have be- 
come a by-word of infamy all over the kingdom. — Charles 
Lamb. 

The great dividing line between books that 
are made to be read and books that are made 
to be bought is not the purely modern thing it 
seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the 
first printing-presses, which catered indulgently 
to hungry scholars and to noble patrons ; and 
we can see it in another generation separating 
" Waverley " and " The Corsair," which every- 
body knew by heart, from the gorgeous "An- 
nual" (bound in Lord Palmerston's cast-off 
waistcoats, hinted Thackeray), which formed a 
decorative feature of well-appointed English 
drawing-rooms. The perfectly natural thing to 
do with an unreadable book is to give it away ; 
and the publication, for more than a quarter of 
a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one 
purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if 
proof were needed, of the business principles 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 197 

which underlay the enlightened activity of 
publishers. 

The wave of sentimentality which submerged 
England when the clear-headed, hard-hearted 
eighteenth century had done its appointed work, 
and lay a-dying, the prodigious advance in gen- 
tility from the days of Lady Mary Wortley 
Montagu to the days of the Countess of Bless- 
ington, found their natural expression in letters. 
It was a period of emotions which were not too 
deep for words, and of decorum which meas- 
ured goodness by conventionalities. Turn 
where we will, we see a tear in every eye, or a 
simper of self-complacency on every lip. Moore 
wept when he beheld a balloon ascension at 
Tivoli, because he had not seen a balloon since 
he was a little boy. The excellent Mr. Hall 
explained in his " Memories of a Long Life " 
that, owing to Lady Blessington's anomalous 
position with Count D'Orsay, "Mrs. Hall never 
accompanied me to her evenings, though she 
was a frequent day caller." Criticism was con- 
trolled by politics, and sweetened by gallantry. 
The Whig and Tory reviewers supported their 
respective candidates to fame, and softened 



198 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

their masculine sternness to affability when 
Mrs. Hemans or Miss Landon, " the Sappho 
of the age," contributed their glowing numbers 
to the world. Miss Landon having breathed a 
poetic sigh in the " Amulet " for 1832, a re- 
viewer in " Fraser's" magnanimously observed : 
" This gentle and fair young lady, so unde- 
servedly neglected by critics, we mean to take 
under our special protection." Could it ever 
have lain within the power of any woman, even 
a poetess, to merit such condescension as this ? 
Of a society so organized, the Christmas an- 
nual was an appropriate and ornamental fea- 
ture. It was costly, — a guinea or a guinea 
and a half being the usual subscription. It 
was richly bound in crimson silk or pea-green 
levant ; Solomon in all his glory was less mag- 
nificent. It was as free from stimulus as eau 
sucree. It was always genteel, and not infre- 
quently aristocratic, — having been known to 
rise in happy years to the schoolboy verses of 
a royal duke. It was made, like Peter Pindar's 
razors, to seU, and it was bought to be given 
away ; at which point its career of usefulness 
was closed. Its languishing steel engravings of 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 199 

Corfu, Ayesha, The Suliote Mother, and The 
Wounded Brigand, may have beguiled a few 
heavy moments after dinner ; and perhaps little 
children in frilled pantalets and laced slippers 
peeped between the gorgeous covers, to marvel 
at the Sultana's pearls, or ask in innocence who 
was the dying Haidee. Death, we may remark, 
was always a prominent feature of annuals. 
Their artists and poets vied with one another 
in the selection of mortuary subjects. Charles 
Lamb was first " hooked into the ' Gem ' " with 
some lines on the editor's dead infant. From a 
partial list, extending over a dozen years, I 
cull this funeral wreath : — 

The Dying ChHd. Poem. 

The Orphans. Steel engraving. 

The Orphan's Tears. Poem. 

The Gypsy's Grave. Steel engraving. 

The Lonely Grave. Poem. 

On a Child's Grave. Poem. 

The Dying Mother to her Infant. Poem. 

Blithesome reading for the Christmas-tide ! 

The annual was as orthodox as it was aris- 
tocratic. " The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain " 
was not more edifying. " The Washerwoman 



200 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

of Finchley Common " was less conspicuously 
virtuous. Here in "The Winter's Wreath" is 
a long poem in blank verse, by a nameless 
clergyman, on "The Efficacy of Rehgion." 
Here in the " Amulet," Mrs. Hemans, " lead- 
ing the way as she deserves to do" (I quote 
from the "Monthly Review"), " clothes in her 
own pure and fascinating language the invita- 
tions which angels whisper into mortal ears." 
And here in the " Forget-Me-Not," Leontine 
hurls mild defiance at the spirit of doubt: — 

Thou sceptic of the hardened brow, 

Attend to Nature's cry ! 
Her sacred essence breathes the glow 

O'er that thou wouldst deny ; 

— an argument which would have carried con- 
viction to Huxley's soul, had he been more 
than eight years old when it was written. Poor 
Coleridge, always in need of a guinea or two, 
was bidden to write some descriptive lines for 
the "Keepsake," on an engraving by Parris 
of the Garden of Boccaccio ; a delightful pic- 
ture of nine ladies and three gentlemen picnick- 
ing in a park, with arcades as tall as aque- 
ducts, a fountain as vast as Niagara, and 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 201 

butterflies twice the size of the rabbits. Cole- 
ridge, exempt by nature from an unserviceable 
sense of humour, executed this commission in 
three pages of painstaking verse, and was 
severely censured for mentioning " in terms 
not sufficiently guarded, one of the most im- 
pure and mischievous books that could find its 
way into the hands of an innocent female." 

The system of first securing an illustration, 
and then ordering a poem to match it, seemed 
right and reasonable to the editor of the an- 
nual, who paid a great deal for his engravings, 
and little or nothing for his poetry. Sometimes 
the poet was not even granted a sight of the 
picture he was expected to describe. We find 
Lady Blessington writing to Dr. William 
Beattie, — the best-natured man of his day, — 
requesting " three or four stanzas " for an an- 
nual called " Buds and Blossoms," which was 
to contain portraits of the children of noble 
families. The particular " buds " whose unfold- 
ing he was asked to immortalize were the three 
sons of the Duke of Buccleuch ; and it was gently 
hinted that " an allusion to the family would 
add interest to the subject " ; — in plain words. 



202 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

that a little well-timed flattery might be trusted 
to expand the sales. Another year the same 
unblushing petitioner was even more hardy in 
her demand. 

" Will you write me a page of verse for the 
portrait of Miss Forester ? The young lady is 
seated with a little dog on her lap, which she 
looks at rather pensively. She is fair, with 
light hair, and is in mourning." 

Here is an inspiration for a poet. A picture, 
which he has not seen, of a young lady in 
mourning looking pensively at a little dog! 
And poor Beattie was never paid a cent for 
these effusions. His sole rewards were a few 
words of thanks, and Lady Blessington's cards 
for parties he was too ill to attend. 

More business-like poets made a specialty of 
fitting pictures with verses, as a tailor fits cus- 
tomers with coats. A certain Mr. Harvey, 
otherwise lost to fame, was held to be unri- 
valled in this art. For many years his " chaste 
and classic pen " supplied the annuals with 
flowing stanzas, equally adapted to the timor- 
ous taste of editors, and to the limitations of 
the " innocent females " for whom the volumes 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 203 

were predestined. "Mr. Harvey embodies in 
two or three lines the expression of a whole 
picture," says an enthusiastic reviewer, " and at 
the same time turns his inscription into a little 
gem of poetry." As a specimen gem, I quote 
one of four verses accompanying an engraving 
called Morning Dreams, — a young woman 
reclining on a couch, and simpering vapidly at 
the curtains : — 

She has been dreaming, and her thoughts are still 
On their far journey in the land of dreams ; 

The forms we call — but may not chase — at will, 
And sweet low voices, soft as distant streams. 

This is a fair sample of the verse supplied for 
Christmas annuals, which, however " chaste 
and classic," was surely never intended to be 
read. It is only right, however, to remember 
that Thackeray's " Piscator and Piscatrix" 
was written at Lady Blessington's behest, to 
accompany Wat tier's engraving of The Happy 
Anglers ; and that Thackeray told Locker he 
was so much pleased with this picture, and so 
engrossed with his own poem, that he forgot to 
shave for the two whole days he was working 
at it. To write " good occasional verse," by 



204 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

wMch he meant verse begged or ordered for 
some such desperate emergency as Lady Bless- 
ington's, was, in his eyes, an intellectual feat. 
It represented difficulties overcome, like those 
wonderful old Italian frescoes fitted so harmo- 
niously into unaccommodating spaces. Nothing 
can be more charming than " Piscator and Pis- 
catrix," and nothing can be more insipid than 
the engraving which inspired the lively rhymes : 

As on this pictured page I look, 
This pretty tale of line and hook, 
As though it were a novel-book, 

Amuses and engages : 
I know them both, the boy and'girl, 
She is the daughter of an Earl, 
The lad (that has his hair in curl) 

My lord the County's page is. 

A pleasant place for such a pair ! 
The fields lie basking in the glare ; 
No breath of wind the heavy air 

Of lazy summer quickens. 
Hard by you see the castle tall, 
The village nestles round the wall, 
As round about the hen, its small 

Young progeny of chickens. 

The verses may be read in any edition of 
Thackeray's ballads ; but when we have hunted 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 205 

up the " pictured page " in a mouldy old " Keep- 
sake," and see an expressionless girl, a feature- 
less boy, an indistinguishable castle, and no 
village, we are tempted to agree with Charles 
Lamb, who swore that he liked poems to ex- 
plain pictures, and not pictures to illustrate 
poems. " Your wood-cut is a rueful lignum 
mortis.''^ 

There was a not unnatural ambition on the 
part of publishers and editors to secure for 
their annuals one or two names of repute, with 
which to leaven the mass of mediocrity. It 
mattered little if the distinguished writer con- 
scientiously contributed the feeblest offspring 
of his pen ; that was a reasonable reckoning, — 
distinguished writers do the same to-day ; but 
it mattered a great deal if, as too often hap- 
pened, he broke his word, and failed to con- 
tribute anything. Then the unhappy editor 
was compelled to publish some such apologetic 
note as this, from the "Amulet" of 1833. " The 
first sheet of the ' Amulet ' was reserved for my 
friend Mr. Bulwer, who had kindly tendered 
me his assistance ; but, in consequence of vari- 
ous unavoidable circumstances" (a pleasure 



206 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

trip on the Ehine), "he has been compelled to 
postpone his aid until next year." On such 
occasions, the " reserved " pages were filled by 
some veteran annualist, like Mr. Alaric At- 
tila Watts, editor of the "Literary Souvenir "; 
or perhaps Mr. Thomas Haynes Bailey, he who 
wrote " I 'd be a Butterfly," and " Gaily the 
Troubadour," was persuaded to warble some 
such appropriate sentiment as this in the 
" Forget-Me-Not " : — 

It is a book we christen thus, 
Less fleeting than the flower ; 

And 't will recall the past to us 
With talismanic power ; 

which was a true word spoken in rhyme. No- 
thing recalls that faded past, with its simpering 
sentimentality, its reposeful ethics, its shut-in 
standards, and its differentiation of the mascu- 
line and feminine intellects, like the yellow 
pages of an annual. 

Tom Moore, favourite' of gods and men, was 
singled out by publishers as the lode-star of 
their destinies, as the poet who could be best 
trusted to impart to the "Amethyst" or the 
" Talisman " (how like Pullman cars they 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 207 

sound ! ) that " elegant lightness " which be- 
fitted its mission in life. His accounts of the 
repeated attacks made on his virtue, and the 
repeated repulses he administered, fill by no 
means the least amusing pages of his journal. 
The first attempt was made by Orne, who, in 
1826, proposed that Moore should edit a new 
annual on the plan of the " Souvenir " ; and 
who assured the poet — always as deep in dif- 
ficulties as Micawber — that, if the enterprise 
proved successful, it would yield him from five 
hundred to a thousand pounds a year. Moore, 
dazzled but not duped, declined the task ; and 
the following summer, the engraver Heath 
made him a similar proposition, but on more 
assured terms. Heath was then preparing to 
launch upon the world of fashion his gorgeous 
" Keepsake " — " the toy-shop of literature," 
Lockhart called it ; and he offered Moore, first 
five hundred, and then seven hundred pounds a 
year, if he would accept the editorship. Seven 
hundred pounds loomed large in the poet's 
fancy, but pride forbade the bargain. The 
author of " Lalla Kookh " could not consent to 
bow his laurelled head, and pilot the feeble 



208 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

Fatimas and Zelicas, the noble infants in coral 
necklets, and the still nobler ladies with pearl 
pendants on their brows, into the safe harbour 
of boudoir and drawing-room. He made this 
clear to Heath, who, nothing daunted, set off 
at once for Abbotsford, and laid his proposals 
at the feet of Sir Walter Scott, adding to his 
bribe another hundred pounds. 

Scott, the last man in Christendom to have 
undertaken such an office, or to have succeeded 
in it, softened his refusal with a good-natured 
promise to contribute to the "Keepsake" when 
it was launched. He was not nervous about his 
literary standing, and he had no sensitive fear 
of lowering it by journeyman's work. " I have 
neither the right nor the wish," he wrote once 
to Murray, " to be considered above a common 
labourer in the trenches." Moore, however, was 
far from sharing this modest unconcern. When 
Eeynolds, on whom the editorship of the 
" Keepsake " finally devolved, asked him for 
some verses, he peremptorily declined. Then 
began a system of pursuit and escape, of as- 
sault and repidse, which casts the temptations 
of St. Anthony into the shade. " By day and 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 209 

night," so Moore declares, Reynolds was "after" 
him, always increasing the magnitude of his 
bribe. At last he forced a check for a hundred 
pounds into the poet's empty pocket (for all 
the world like a scene in Caran d' Ache's " His- 
toire d'un Cheque "), imploring in return a hun- 
dred lines of verse. But Moore's virtue — or 
his vanity — was impregnable. " The task was 
but light, and the money would have been con- 
venient," he confesses ; " but I forced it back 
on him again. The fact is, it is my name 
brings these offers, and my name would suffer 
by accepting them." 

One might suppose that the baffled tempter 
would now have permanently withdrawn, save 
that the strength of tempters lies in their 
never knowing when they are beaten. Three 
years later. Heath renewed the attack, propos- 
ing that Moore should furnish all the letter- 
press, prose and verse, of the " Keepsake " for 
1832, receiving in payment the generous sum 
of one thousand pounds. Strange to say, Moore 
took rather kindly to this appalling suggestion, 
admitted he liked it better than its predeces- 
sors, and consented to think the matter over 



210 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

for a fortnight. In the end, however, he ad- 
hered to his original determination to hold him- 
self virgin of annuals ; and refused the thousand 
pounds, which would have paid all his debts, 
only to fall, as fall men must, a victim to female 
blandishments. He was cajoled into writing 
some lines for the " Casket," edited by Mrs. 
Blencoe; and had afterwards the pleasure of 
discovering that the astute lady had added 
to her list of attractions another old poem 
of his, which, to avoid sameness, she oblig- 
ingly credited to Lord Byron; — enough to 
make that ill-used poet turn uneasily in his 
grave. 

Charles Lamb's detestation of annuals dates 
naturally enough from the hour he was first 
seduced into becoming a contributor ; and every 
time he lapsed from virtue, his rage blazed out 
afresh. When his ill-timed sympathy for a 
bereaved parent — and that parent an editor 
— landed him in the pages of the " Gem,'* 
he wrote to Barton in an access of ill-humour 
which could find no phrases sharp enough to 
feed it. 

" I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 211 

dandy plates, the names of contributors poked 
up into your eyes in the first page, and whistled 
through all the covers of magazines, the bare- 
faced sort of emulation, the immodest candi- 
dateship, brought into so little space ; in short 
I detest to appear in an annual. . . . Don't 
think I set up for being proud on this point ; I 
like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity as well 
as any one. But these pompous masquerades 
without masks (naked names or faces) I hate. 
So there 's a bit of my mind." 

" Frippery," " frumpery," " show and empti- 
ness," are the mildest epithets at Lamb's com- 
mand, as often as he laments his repeated falls 
from grace ; and a few years before his death, 
when that " dumb soporifical good-for-no thing- 
ness " (curse of the Enfield lanes) weighted his 
pen, and dulled the lively processes of his brain, 
he writes with poignant melancholy : — 

" I cannot scribble a long letter. I am, when 
not on foot, very desolate, and take no interest 
in anything, scarce hate anything but annuals." 
It is the last expression of a just antipathy, an 
instinctive clinging to something which can be 
reasonably hated to the end. 



212 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

The most pretentious and the most aristo- 
cratic of the annuals was the ever famous " Book 
of Beauty," edited for many years by the Count- 
ess of Blessington. Resting on a solid founda- 
tion of personal vanity (a superstructure never 
known to fail), it reached a heroic measure of 
success, and yielded an income which permitted 
the charming woman who conducted it to live 
as far beyond her means as any leader of the 
fashionable world in London. It was estimated 
that Lady Blessington earned by the " gorgeous 
inanities " she edited, and by the vapid tales 
she wrote, an income of from two thousand to 
three thousand pounds ; but she would never 
have been paid so well for her work had she 
not supported her social position by an expendi- 
ture of twice that sum. Charles Greville, who 
spares no scorn he can heap upon her editorial 
methods, declares that she attained her ends 
" by puffing and stuffing, and untiring indus- 
try, by practising on the vanity of some and 
the good-nature of others. And though I never 
met with any one who had read her books, 
except the ' Conversations with Byron,' which 
are too good to be hers, they are unquestion- 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 213 

ably a source of considerable profit, and she 
takes her place confidently and complacently 
as one of the literary celebrities of her day." 

Greville's instinctive unkindness leaves him 
often wide of the mark, but on this occasion 
we can only say that he might have spoken his 
truths more humanely. If Lady Blessington 
helped to create the demand which she sup- 
plied, if she turned her friendships to account, 
and made of hospitality a means to an end (a 
line of conduct not unknown to-day), she worked 
with unsparing diligence, and with a sort of 
desperate courage for over twenty years. Eival 
Books of Beauty were launched upon a sur- 
feited market, but she maintained her prece- 
dence. For ten years she edited the "Keep- 
sake," and made it a source of revenue, until 
the unhappy bankruptcy and death of Heath. 
In her annuals we breathe the pure air of ducal 
households, and consort with the peeresses of 
England, turning condescendingly now and then 
to contemplate a rusticity so obviously artificial, 
it can be trusted never to offend. That her 
standard of art (she had no standard of letters) 
was acceptable to the British public is proved 



214 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

by the rapturous praise of critics and reviewers. 
Thackeray, indeed, professed to think the 
sumptuous ladies, who loll and languish in the 
pages of the year-book, underclad and indec- 
orous ; but this was in the spirit of hypercriti- 
cism. Hear rather how a writer in "Fraser's 
Magazine" describes in a voice trembling with 
emotion the opulent charms of one of the 
Countess of Blessington's " Beauties " : — 

" There leans the tall and imperial form of 
the enchantress, with raven tresses surmounted 
by the cachemire of sparkling red ; while her 
ringlets flow in exuberant waves over the full- 
formed neck; and barbaric pearls, each one 
worth a king's ransom, rest in marvellous con- 
trast with her dark and mysterious loveliness." 

" Here 's richness ! " to quote our friend Mr. 
Squeers. Here 's something of which it is hard 
to think a public could ever tire. Yet sixteen 
years later, when the Countess of Blessington 
died in poverty and exile, but full of courage 
to the end, the " Examiner " tepidly observed 
that the probable extinction of the year-book 
" would be the least of the sad regrets attend- 
ing her loss." 



THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 215 

For between 1823 and 1850 three hundred 
annuals had been published in England, and 
the end was very near. Exhausted nature was 
crying for release. It is terrible to find an able 
and honest writer like Miss Mitford editing a 
preposterous volume called the " Iris," of in- 
human bulk and superhuman inanity ; a book 
which she weU knew could never, under any 
press of circumstances, be read by mortal man 
or woman. There were annuals to meet every 
demand, and to please every class of purchaser. 
Comic annuals for those who hoped to laugh ; 
a " Botanic Annual " for girls who took coun- 
try walks with their governess ; an " Oriental 
Annual" for readers of Byron and Moore; a 
"Landscape Annual" for lovers of nature; 
" The Christian Keepsake " for ladies of seri- 
ous minds ; and " The Protestant Annual " for 
those who feared that Christianity might pos- 
sibly embrace the Komish Church. There were 
five annuals for English children ; from one of 
which, " The Juvenile Keepsake," I quote these 
lines, so admirably adapted to the childish 
mind. Newton is supposed to speak them in 
his study : — 



216 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 

Pure and ethereal essence, fairest light, 
Come hither, and before my watchful eyes 
Disclose thy hidden nature, and unbind 
Thy mystic, fine-attenuated parts ; 
That so, intently marking, I the source 
May learn of colours, Nature's matchless gifts. 

There are three pages of this poem, all in 
the same simple language, from which it is fair 
to infer that the child's annual, like its grown- 
up neighbour, was made to be bought, not read. 



OUR ACCOMPLISHED GREAT-GRAND- 
MOTHER 

Next to mere idleness, I tliink knotting is to be reckoned 
in the scale of insignificance. — Du. Johnson. 

Readers of Dickens (which ought to mean all 
men and women who have mastered the Eng- 
lish alphabet) will remember how that esti- 
mable schoolmistress, Miss Monflathers, eluci- 
dated Dr. "Watts's masterpiece, which had been 
quoted somewhat rashly by a teacher. " ' The 
little busy bee,' " said Miss Monflathers, draw- 
ing herself up, " is applicable only to genteel 
children. 

In books, or work, or healthful play, 

is quite right as far as they are concerned ; 
and the work means painting on velvet, fancy 
needlework, or embroidery." 

It also meant, in the good Miss Monflath- 
ers's day, making filigree baskets that would 
not hold anything, Ionic temples of Bristol- 
board, shell flowers, and paper landscapes. It 
meant pricking pictures with pins, taking " im- 



218 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

pressions" of butterflies' wings on sheets of 
gummed paper, and messing with strange, mys- 
terious compounds called diaphanie and poti- 
chomanie, by means of which a harmless glass 
tumbler or a respectable window-pane could be 
turned into an object of desolation. Indeed, 
when the genteel young ladies of this period 
were not reading " Merit opposed to Fascina- 
tion ; exemplified in the story of Eugenio," or 
" An Essay on the Refined Felicity which may 
arise from the Marriage Contract," they were 
cultivating what were then called " ornamental 
arts," but which later on became known as 
" accomplishments." " It is amazing to me," 
says that most amiable of sub-heroes, Mr. Bing- 
ley, " how young ladies can have patience to 
be so very accomplished as they all are. They 
paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I 
scarcely know any one who cannot do aU this ; 
and I am sure I never heard a young lady 
spoken of for the first time, without being in- 
formed that she was very accomplished." 

We leave the unamiable Mr. Darcy snort- 
ing at his friend's remark, to consider the 
paucity of Mr. Bingley's fist. Tables, screens, 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 219 

and purses represent but the first beginnings 
of that misdirected energy which for the best 
part of a century embellished English homes. 
The truly accomplished young lady in Miss 
More's "Coelebs" paints flowers and shells, 
draws ruins, gilds and varnishes wood, is an 
adept in Japan work, and stands ready to 
begin modelling, etching, and engraving. The 
great principle of ornamental art was the repro- 
duction of an object — of any object — in an 
alien material. The less adapted this material 
was to its purpose, the greater the difficulties 
it presented to the artist, the more precious 
became the monstrous masterpiece. To take a 
plain sheet of paper and draw a design upon it 
was ignominious in its simplicity; but to con- 
struct the same design out of paper spirals, 
rolling up some five hundred slips with uniform 
tightness, setting them on end, side by side, 
and painting or gilding the tops, — that was a 
feat of which any young lady might be proud. 
It was so uncommonly hard to do, it ought to 
have been impossible. Cutting paper with fine 
sharp scissors and a knife was taught in schools 
(probably in Miss Monflathers's school, though 



220 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

Dickens does not mention it) as a fashionable 
pastime. The "white design" — animals, land- 
scape, or marine — was printed on a black 
background, which was cut away with great 
dexterity, the spaces being small and intricate. 
When all the black paper had been removed, 
the flimsy tracery was pasted on a piece of 
coloured paper, thus presenting — after hours 
of patient labour — much the same appearance 
that it had in the beginning. It was then 
glassed, framed, and presented to appreciative 
parents, as a proof of their daughter's industry 
and taste. 

The most famous work of art ever made out 
of paper was probably the celebrated "herbal" 
of Mrs. Delany, — Mrs. Delany whom Burke 
pronounced "the model of an accomplished 
gentlewoman." She acquired her accomplish- 
ments at an age when most people seek to re- 
linquish theirs, — having learned to draw when 
she was thirty, to paint when she was forty, 
and to write verse when she was eighty-two. 
She also "excelled in embroidery and shell- 
work"; and when Miss Burney made her first 
visit to St. James's Place, she found Mrs. De- 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 221 

lany's walls covered with "ornaments of her 
own execution of striking elegance, in cuttings 
and variegated stained papers." The herbal, 
however, was the crowning achievement of her 
life. It contained nearly a thousand plants, 
made of thin strips of coloured paper, pasted 
layer over layer with the utmost nicety upon 
a black background, and producing an effect 
" richer than painting." 

Cold Winter views amid his realms of snow 
Delany's vegetable statues blow ; 
Smoothes his stern brow, delays his hoary wing, 
And eyes with wonder all the blooms of Spring. 

The flowers were copied accurately from nature, 
and florists all over the kingdom vied with one 
another in sending Mrs. Delany rare and'beau- 
tiful specimens. The Queen ardently admired 
this herbal, and the King, who regarded it with 
veneration not untinged by awe, expressed 
his feelings by giving its creator a house at 
Windsor, and settling upon her an annuity of 
three hundred pounds. Yet Miss Seward com- 
plained that although England " teemed with 
genius," George III was "no Caesar Augus- 
tus," to encourage and patronize the arts. To 



222 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

the best of his ability, he did. His conception 
of genius and art may not have tallied with 
that of Augustus ; but when an old lady made 
paper flowers to perfection, he gave her a royal 
reward. 

Mrs. Delany's example was followed in court 
circles, and in the humbler walks of life. Shell- 
work, which was one of her accomplishments, 
became the rage. Her illustrious friend, the 
Duchess of Portland, " made shell frames and 
feather designs, adorned grottoes, and collected 
endless objects in the animal and vegetable 
kingdom." Young ladies of taste made flowers 
out of shells, dyeing the white ones with Brazil 
wood, and varnishing them with gum arabic. A 
rose of red shells, with a heart of knotted yel- 
low silk, was almost as much admired as a 
picture of birds with their feathers pasted on 
the paper. This last triumph of realism pre- 
sented a host of difficulties to the perpetrator. 
When the bill and legs of the bird had been 
painted in water colours on heavy Bristol- 
board, the space for its body was covered with 
a paste of gum arabic as thick as a shilling. 
This paste was kept "tacky or clammy" to 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 223 

hold the feathers, which were stripped off the 
poor little dead bird, and stuck on the pre- 
pared surface, the quills being cut down with 
a knife. Weights were used to keep the feathers 
in place, the result being that most of them 
adhered to the lead instead of to the Bristol- 
board, and came off discouragingly when the 
work was nearly done. As a combination of 
art and nature, the bird picture had no rival 
except the butterfly picture, where the clipped 
wings of butterflies were laid between two 
sheets of gummed paper, and the "impres- 
sions" thus taken, reinforced with a little gild- 
ing, were attached to a painted body. It may 
be observed that the quality of mercy was then 
a good deal strained. Mrs. Montagu's famous 
"feather-room," in her house on Portman 
Square, was ornamented with hangings made 
by herseK from the plumage of hundreds of 
birds, every attainable variety being repre- 
sented; yet no one of her friends, not even 
the sainted Hannah More, ever breathed a 
sigh of regret over the merry little lives that 
were wasted for its meretricious decorations. 
Much time and ingenuity were devoted by 



224 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

industrious young people to the making of 
baskets, and no material, however unexpected, 
came amiss to their patient hands. Allspice 
berries, steeped in brandy to soften them and 
strung on wire, were very popular ; and rice bas- 
kets had a chaste simplicity of their own. These 
last were made of pasteboard, lined with silk 
or paper, the grains of rice being gummed on 
in solid diamond-shaped designs. If the deco- 
ration appeared a trifle monotonous, as weU it 
might, it was diversified with coloured glass 
beads. Indeed, we are assured that "baskets 
of this description may be very elegantly orna- 
mented with groups of small shells, little arti- 
ficial bouquets, crystals, and the fine feathers 
from the heads of birds of beautiful plumage"; 
— with anything, in short, that could be pasted 
on and persuaded to stick. When the supply of 
glue gave out, wafer baskets — wafers required 
only moistening — or alum baskets (made of 
wire wrapped round with worsted, and steeped 
in a solution of alum, which was coloured yellow 
with saffron or purple with logwood) were held 
in the highest estimation. The modern mind, 
with its puny resources, is bewildered by the 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 225 

multiplicity of materials which seem to have 
lain scattered around the domestic hearth a hun- 
dred years ago. There is a famous old receipt 
for " silvering paper without silver," a pro- 
cess designed to be economical, but which re- 
quires so many messy and alien ingredients, 
like " Indian glue," and " Muscovy talc," and 
" Venice turpentine," and " Japan size," and 
" Chinese varnish," that mere silver seems by 
comparison a cheap and common thing. Young 
ladies whose thrift equalled their ingenuity 
made their own varnish by boiling isinglass in 
a quart of brandy, — a lamentable waste of 
supplies. 

Genteel parcels were always wrapped in 
silver paper. We remember how Miss Edge- 
worth's Rosamond tries in vain to make one 
sheet cover the famous " filigree basket," which 
was her birthday present to her Cousin Bell, 
and which pointed its own moral by falling to 
pieces before it was presented. Rosamond's 
father derides this basket because he is im- 
plored not to grasp it by its myrtle-wreathed 
handle. " But what is the use of the handle," 
he asks, in the conclusive, irritating fashion of 



226 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

the Edgeworthian parent, " if we are not to 
take hold of it? And pray is this the thing 
you have been about all week ? I have seen 
you dabbling with paste and rags, and could 
not conceive what you were doing." 

Rosamond's half -guinea — her godmother's 
gift — is spent buying filigree paper, and me- 
dallions, and a " frost ground " for this basket, 
and she is ruthlessly shamed by its unstable 
character; whereas Laura, who gives her money 
secretly to a little lace-maker, has her gener- 
osity revealed at exactly the proper moment, 
and is admired and praised by all the company. 
Apart from Miss Edgeworth's conception of 
life, as made up of well-adjusted punishments 
and rewards, a half -guinea does seem a good 
deal to spend on filigree paper ; but then a single 
sheet of gold paper cost six shillings, unless 
gilded at home, after the following process, 
which was highly commended for economy : — 

" Take yellow ochre, grind it with rain-water, 
and lay a ground with it aU over the paper, 
which should be fine wove. When dry, take 
the white of an egg and about a quarter of an 
ounce of sugar candy, and beat them together 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 227 

until the sugar candy is dissolved. Then strike 
it all over the ground with a varnish brush, and 
immediately lay on the gold leaf, pressing it 
down with a piece of fine cotton. When dry, 
polish it with a dog's tooth or agate. A sheet 
of this paper may be prepared for eighteen 
pence." 

No wonder little Rosamond was unequal to 
such labour, and her haK-guinea was squan- 
dered in extravagant purchases. Miss Edge- 
worth, trained in her father's theory that children 
should be always occupied, was a good deal 
distressed by the fruits of their industry. The 
" chatting girls cutting up silk and gold paper," 
whom Miss Austen watched with unconcern, 
would have fretted Miss Edgeworth's soul, un- 
less she knew that sensible needle-cases, pin- 
cushions, and work-bags were in process of con- 
struction. Yet the celebrated "rational toy- 
shop," with its hand-looms instead of dolls, and 
its machines for drawing in perspective instead 
of tin soldiers and Noah's arks, stood respons- 
ible for the inutilities she scorned. And what 
of the charitable lady in " Lazy Lawrence," 
who is " making a grotto," and buying shells 



228 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

and fossils for its decoration ? Even a filigree 
basket, which had at least the grace of imper- 
manence, seems desirable by comparison with 
a grotto. It will be remembered also that 
Madame de Rosier, the " Good French Govern- 
ess," traces her lost son, that " promising 
young man of fourteen," by means of a box 
he has made out of refuse bits of shell thrown 
aside in a London restaurant ; while the son 
in turn discovers a faithful family servant 
through the mediumof a painted pasteboard dog, 
which the equally ingenious domestic has exposed 
for sale in a shop. It was a good thing in Miss 
Edgeworth's day to cultivate the " ornamental 
arts," were it only for the reunion of families. 
Pasteboard, a most ungrateful and unyield- 
ing material, was the basis of so many house- 
hold decorations that a little volume, published 
in the beginning of the last century, is devoted 
exclusively to its possibihties. This book, which 
went through repeated editions, is called " The 
Art of Working in Pasteboard upon Scientific 
Principles " ; and it gives minute directions for 
making boxes, baskets, tea-trays, caddies, — 
even candlesticks, and "an inkstand in the 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 229 

shape of a castle witli a tower," — a baffling 
arcliitectural design. What patience and inge- 
nuity must have been expended upon this paste- 
board castle, which had a wing for the ink 
well, a wing for the sand box, five circular 
steps leading up to the principal entrance, a 
terrace which was a drawer, a balcony sur- 
rounded by a " crenelled screen," a tower to 
hold the quills, a vaulted cupola which lifted 
like a lid, and a lantern with a " quadrilateral 
pyramid" for its roof, surmounted by a real 
pea or a glass bead as the final bit of decora- 
tion. There is a drawing of this edifice, which 
is as imposing as its dimensions will permit ; 
and there are four pages of mysterious instruc- 
tions which make the reader feel as though he 
were studying architecture by correspondence. 
Far more difficult of accomplishment, and 
far more useless when accomplished, — for they 
could not even hold pens and ink, — were the 
Grecian temples and Gothic towers, made of 
pasteboard covered with marbled paper, and 
designed as " elegant ornaments for the mantel- 
piece." A small Ionic temple requires ten pages 
of directions. It is built of " the best Bristol- 



230 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

board, except the shafts of the pillars and some 
of the decorations, which are made of royal 
drawing-paper " ; and its manufacturers are 
implored not to spare time, trouble, or material, 
if they would attain to anything so classic. 
" The art of working in pasteboard," says the 
preface of this engaging little book, " may be 
carried to a high degree of usefulness and per- 
fection, and may eventually be productive of 
substantial benefits to young persons of both 
sexes, who wisely devote their leisure hours to 
pleasing, quiet, and useful recreations, prefer- 
ably to frivolous, noisy, and expensive amuse- 
ments." 

A pleasing, quiet, and useful recreation 
which wasted nothing but eyesight, — and that 
nobody valued, — was pricking pictures with 
pins. The broad lines and heavy shadows were 
pricked with stout pins, the fine lines and 
high fights with fittle ones, while a toothed 
wheel, sharply pointed, was used for large 
spaces and simple decorative designs. This was 
an ambitious field of art, much of the work 
being of a microscopic delicacy. The folds of a 
lady's dress could be pricked in such film-like 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 231 

waves that only close scrutiny revealed the 
thousand tiny holes of which its billowy soft- 
ness was composed. The cleanness and dryness 
of pins commend them to our taste after a 
long contemplation of varnish and glue pots; 
of "poonah work," which was a sticky sort of 
stencilling; of "Japan work," in which em- 
bossed figures were made of " gum- water, thick- 
ened to a proper consistence with equal parts 
of bole ammoniac and whiting" ; of " Chinese 
enamel," which was a base imitation of ebony 
inlaid with ivory ; and of " potichomanie," 
which converted a piece of English glass into 
something that " not one in a hundred could 
tell from French china." We sympathize with 
the refined editor of the " Monthly Museum," 
who recommends knotting to his female readers, 
not only because it had the sanction of a queen, 

Who, when she rode in coach abroad, 
Was always knotting threads ; 

but because of its " pure nature " and " inno- 
cent simplicity." "I cannot but think," says 
this true friend of my sex, " that shirts and 
smocks are unfit for any lady of delicacy to 
handle; but the shuttle is an easy flowing 



232 OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 

object, to which the eye may remove with pro- 
priety and grace." 

Grace was never overlooked in our great- 
grandmother's day, but took rank as an im- 
portant factor in education. A London school- 
mistress, offering in 1815 some advice as to 
the music "best fitted for ladies," confesses 
that it is hard to decide between the " wide 
range " of the pianoforte and the harp-player's 
" elegance of position," which gives to her in- 
strument " no small powers of rivalry." Sen- 
timent was interwoven with every accomplish- 
ment. Tender mottoes, like those which Miss 
Euphemia Dundas entreats Thaddeus of War- 
saw to design for her, were painted upon boxes 
and hand-screens. Who can forget the white 
leather " souvenir," adorned with the words 
" Toujours cher," which Miss Euphemia presses 
upon Thaddeus, and which that attractive but 
virtuous exile is modestly reluctant to accept. 
A velvet bracelet embroidered with forget-me- 
nots symbolized friendship. A handkerchief, 
designed as a gift from a young girl to her 
betrothed, had a celestial sphere worked in one 
corner, to indicate the purity of their flame; 



OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 233 

a bouquet of buds and blossoms in another, to 
mark the pleasures and the brevity of life; 
and, in a third, Cupid playing with a spaniel, 
" as an emblem of the most passionate fidelity." 
Even samplers, which represented the first step 
in the pursuit of accomplishments, had their 
emblematic designs no less than their moral 
axioms. The village schoolmistress, whom Miss 
Mitford knew and loved, complained that all 
her pupils wanted to work samplers instead of 
learning to sew; and that all their mothers 
valued these works of art more than they did 
the neatest of caps and aprons. The sampler 
stood for gentility as well as industry. It re- 
flected credit on the family as well as on the 
child. At the bottom of a faded canvas, worked 
more than a hundred years ago, and now hang- 
ing in a great museum of art, is this inspiring 
verse : — 

I have done thia that you may see 
What care my parents took of me. 
And when I 'm dead and in my grave, 
This piece of work I trust you '11 save. 

If the little girl who embodied her high 
hopes in the painful precision of cross-stitch 
could but know of their splendid fulfilment ! 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

She kept an album too, at home, 

Well stocked with all an album's glories, 

Paintings of butterflies and Rome, 

Patterns for trimmings, Persian stories. 

Praed. 

Modern authors who object to being asked 
for tbeir autographs, and who complain pite- 
ously of the persecutions they endure in this 
regard, would do well to consider what they 
have gained by being born in an age when 
commercialism has supplanted compliment. 
Had they been their own great-grandfathers, 
they would have been expected to present to 
their female friends the verses they now sell 
to magazines. They would have written a few 
playful and affectionate lines every time they 
dined out, and have paid for a week's hospi- 
tality with sentimental tributes to their hostess. 
And not their hostess only. Her budding 
daughters would have looked for some recog- 
nition of their charms, and her infant son 
would have presented a theme too obvious for 



I 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 235 

disregard. It is recorded tliat when Campbell 
spent two days at the country seat of Mr. 
James Craig, the Misses Craig kept him busy 
most of that time composing verses for their 
albums, — a pleasant way of entertaining a 
poet guest. On another occasion he writes to 
Mrs. Arkwright, lamenting, though with much 
good-humour, the importunities of mothers. 
" Mrs. Grahame has a plot upon me that I 
should write a poem upon her boy, three years 
old. Oh, such a boy ! But in the way of writ- 
ing lines on lovely children, I am engaged 
three deep, and dare not promise." 

It seems that parents not only petitioned for 
these poetic windfalls, but pressed their claims 
hard. Campbell, one of the most amiable of 
men, yielded in time to this demand, as he had 
yielded to many others, and sent to little Master 
Grahame some verses of singular ineptitude. 

Sweet bud of life ! thy future doom 

Is present to my eyes, 
And joyously I see thee bloom 

In Fortune's fairest skies. 

One day that breast, scarce conscious now, 
Shall bum with patriot flame ; 



236 THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

And, fraught with love, that little brow 
Shall wear the wreath of fame. 

There are many more stanzas, but these are 
enough to make us wonder why parents did not 
let the poet alone. Perhaps, if they had, he 
would have volunteered his services. We know 
that when young Fanny Kemble showed him 
her nosegay at a ball, and asked how she should 
keep the flowers from fading, he answered 
hardily : " Give them to me, and I will inunor- 
talize them," — an enviable assurance of re- 
no^vn. 

Album verses date from the old easy days, 
when rhyming was regarded as a gentlemanly 
accomplishment rather than as a means of live- 
lihood. Titled authors, poets wealthy and well- 
born — for there were always such — naturally 
addressed themselves to the ladies of their ac- 
quaintance. They could say with Lord Chester- 
field that they thanked Heaven they did not 
have to live by their brains. It was a theory, 
long and fondly cherished, that poetry was not 
common merchandise, to be bought and sold 
like meal and malt; that it was, as Burns 
admirably said, either above price or worth 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 237 

nothing at all. Later on, when poets became 
excellent men of business, when Byron had 
been seduced by Murray's generosity, when 
Moore drove his wonderful bargains, and poetic 
narrative was the best-selling commodity in the 
market, we hear a rising murmur of protest 
against the uncommercial exactions of the al- 
bum. Sonneteers who could sell their wares 
for hard cash no longer felt repaid by a word 
of flattery. Even the myrtle wreaths which 
crowned the victors of the Bath Easton con- 
tests appeared but slender compensation, save 
in Miss Seward's eyes, or in Mrs. Hayley's. 
When Mrs. Hayley went to Bath in 1781, and 
witnessed the solemn ceremonies inaugurated 
by Lady Miller ; when she saw the laurels, and 
myrtles, and fluttering ribbons, her soul was 
fired with longing, and she set to work to per- 
suade her husband that the Bath Easton prize 
was not wholly beneath his notice. The author 
of " The Triumphs of Temper " was naturally 
fearful of lowering his dignity by sporting with 
minor poets ; and there was much wifely arti- 
fice in her assumption that such playfulness 
on his part would be recognized as true con- 



238 THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

descension. " If you should feel disposed to 
honour this slight amusement with a light com- 
position, I am persuaded you will oblige very 
highly." The responsive Hayley was not un- 
willing to oblige, provided no one would sus- 
pect him of being in earnest. He " scribbled " 
the desired lines " in the most rapid manner," 
" literally in a morning and a half " (Byron 
did not take much longer to write " The Cor- 
sair"), and sent them off to Bath, where they 
were " admired beyond description," and won 
the prize, so that the gratified Mrs. Hayley 
appeared that night with the myrtle wreath 
woven in her hair. The one famous contribu- 
tor to the Bath Easton vase who did not win 
a prize was Sheridan. He, being entreated to 
write for it some verses on " Charity," com- 
j)lied in these heartless lines : — 

THE VASE SPEAKS 

For heaven's sake bestow on me 
A little wit, for that would be 
Indeed an act of charity. 

Complimentary addresses — those flowery 
tributes which seem so ardent and so facile — 
were beginning to drag a little, even in Wal- 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 239 

pole's day. He himself was an adept in the art 
of polite adulation, and wrote without a blush 
the obliging comparison between the Princess 
Amelia and Yenus (greatly to the disparage- 
ment of Venus), which the flattered lady found 
in the hand of the marble Apollo at Stowe. 
" All women like all or any praise," said Lord 
Byron, who had reason to know the sex. The 
Princess Amelia, stout, sixty, and " strong as 
a Brunswick lion," was pleased to be desig- 
nated as a " Nymph," and to be told she had 
routed Venus from the field. Walpole also 
presented to Madame de Boufflers a "petite 
gentillesse," when she visited Strawberry Hill ; 
and it became the painful duty of the Due de 
Nivernois to translate these lines into French, 
on the occasion of Miss Pelham's grand fete at 
Esher Place. The task kept him absorbed and 
preoccupied most of the day, " lagging behind" 
while the others made a cheerful tour of the 
farms, or listened to the French horns and 
hautboys on the lawn. Finally, when all the 
guests were drinking tea and coffee in the Bel- 
videre, poor Nivernois was delivered of his 
verselets, which were received with a polite 



240 THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

semblance of gratification, and for the remain- 
ing hours his spirit was at peace. But it does 
seem a hard return to exact for hospitality, and 
must often have suggested to men of letters 
the felicity of staying at home. 

Miss Seward made it her happy boast that 
the number and the warmth of Mr. Hayley's 
tributes — inserted duly in her album — raised 
her to a rivalry with Swift's SteUa, or Prior's 
Chloe. " Our four years' correspondence has 
been enriched with a galaxy of little poetic 
gems of the first water." Nor was the lady back- 
ward in returning compliment for compliment. 
That barter of praise, that exchange of felici- 
tation, which is both so polite and so profitable, 
was as well understood by our sentimental an- 
cestors as it is in this hard-headed age. Indeed, 
I am not sure that the Muse did not sometimes 
calculate more closely then than she ventures 
to do to-day. We know that Canon Seward 
wrote an elegiac poem on a young nobleman 
who was held to be dying, but who — per- 
versely enough — recovered ; whereupon the 
reverend eulogist changed the name, and trans- 
ferred his heartfelt lamentations to another 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 241 

youth whose death was fully assured. In the 
same business-like spirit Miss Seward paid back 
Mr. Hayley flattery for flattery, until even 
the slow-witted satirists of the period made 
merry over this commerce of applause. 

Miss Seward. Pride of Sussex, England's glory, 

Mr. Hayley, is that you ? 
Mr. Hayley. Ma'am, you carry all before you, 

Trust me, Lichfield swan, you do. 
Miss Seward. Ode, dramatic, epic, sonnet, 

Mr. Hayley, you 're divine ! 
Mr. Hayley. Ma'am, I '11 give my word upon it, 

You yourself are all the Nine. 

Moore, as became a poet of ardent tempera- 
ment, wrote the most gallant album verses of 
his day ; for which reason, and because his star 
of fame rode high, he endured sharp persecu- 
tion at the hands of admiring but cov.etous 
friends. Young ladies asked him in the most 
offhand manner to " address a poem " to 
them ; and women of rank smiled on him in 
ballrooms, and confided to him that they were 
keeping their albums virgin of verse until 
" an introduction to Mr. Moore " should enable 
them to request him to write on the opening 
page. " I fight this off as well as I can," he 



242 THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

tells Lord Byron, who knew both the relent- 
lessness of such demands and the compliant 
nature of his friend. On one occasion Lady 
Holland showed Moore some stanzas which 
Lord Holland had written in Latin and in 
English, on the subject of a snuff-box given her 
by Napoleon; bidding him imperiously "do 
something of the kind," and adding that she 
greatly desired a corresponding tribute from 
Lord Byron. Moore wisely declined to make 
any promises for Byron (one doubts whether 
the four lines which that nobleman eventu- 
ally contributed afforded her ladyship much 
pleasure), but wrote his own verses before 
he was out of bed the next morning, and 
carried them to Holland House, expecting to 
breakfast with its mistress. He found her, 
however, in such a captious mood, so out of 
temper with all her little world, that, although 
he sat down to the table, he did not venture to 
hint his hunger ; and as no one asked him to 
eat or drink, he slipped off in half an hour, 
and sought (his poem still in his pocket) the 
more genial hospitality of Rosset's restaurant. 
Had all this happened twenty years earlier, 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 243 

Moore's self-esteem would have been deeply 
wounded ; but the poet was by now a man of 
mark, and could afford to laugh at his own 
discomfiture. 

Moore's album verses may be said to make 
up in warmth what they lack in address. Minor 
poets — minims like William Robert Spencer 

— surpassed him easily in adroitness ; and 
sometimes won for themselves slender but 
abiding reputations by expressing with con- 
summate ease sentiments they did not feel. 
Spencer's pretty lines beginning, — 

Too late I stayed, — forgive the crime ! 

Unheeded flew the hours : 
How noiseless falls the foot of time 

That only treads on flowers ! 

— lines which all our grandmothers had by 
heart — may still be found in compilations of 
English verse. Their dexterous allusions to 
the diamond sparks in Time's hour-glass, and 
to the bird-of-paradise plumage in his grey 
wings, their veiled and graceful flattery, con- 
trast pleasantly with Moore's Hibernian bold- 
ness, with his offhand demand to be paid in 
kisses for his songs — 



244 THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

That rosy month alone can bring 

What makes the bard divine ; 
Oh, Lady ! how my lip would sing, 

If once 't were prest to thine. 

A discreet young woman might have hesitated 
to show this album page to friends. 

Byron's "tributes," when he paid them, were 
singularly chill. He may have buried his heart 
at Mrs. Spencer Smith's feet ; but the lines in 
her album which record this interment are 
eloquent of a speedy resurrection. When Lady 
Blessington demanded some verses, he wrote 
them ; but he explained with almost insulting 
lucidity that his heart was as grey as his head 
(he was thirty-one), and that he had nothing 
warmer than friendship to offer in place of ex- 
tinguished affections. Moore must have wearied 
painfully of albums and of their rapacious de- 
mands ; yet to the end of his life he could be 
harassed into feigning a poetic passion ; but 
Byron stood at bay. He was a hunted creature, 
and the instinct of self-preservation taught him 
savage methods of escape. 

There are people who, from some delicacy of 
mental fibre, find it exceedingly difficult to be 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 245 

rude ; and there are people who — like Charles 
Lamb — have a curious habit of doing what 
they do not want to do, and what they know is 
not worth doing, for the sake of giving pleasure 
to some utterly insignificant acquaintance. The 
first class lacks a valuable weapon in life's war- 
fare. The second class is so small, and the 
motives which govern it are so inscrutable, that 
we are apt to be exasperated by its amiability. 
It is easy to sympathize with Thackeray, who, 
being badgered to write in an album already 
graced by the signatures of several distinguished 
musicians, said curtly : "What ! among all those 
fiddlers ! " This hardy British superciliousness 
commends itself to our sense of humour, no 
less than to our sense of self -protection. A great 
deal has been said, especially by Frenchmen, 
about the wisdom of polite denials ; but a rough 
word, spoken in time, is seldom without weight 
in England. 

Yet, for a friend, Thackeray found no labour 
hard. The genial tolerance of " The Pen and the 
Album " suggests something akin to affection 
for these pillaging little books when the right 
people owned them, — when they belonged to 



246 THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

" Chesham Place." Locker tells a pleasant story 
of meeting Thackeray in Pall Mall, on Ms way 
to Kensington, and offering to join him in his 
walk. This offer was declined, Thackeray ex- 
plaining that he had some rhymes trotting 
through his head, and that he was trying to 
polish them off in the course of a solitary stroll. 
A few days later they met again, and Thack- 
eray said, "I finished those verses, and they are 
very nearly being very good. I call them ' Mrs. 
Katherine's Lantern.' I did them for Dickens's 
daughter." 

" Very nearly being very good ! " This is an 
author's modest estimate. Readers there are 
who have found them so absolutely good that 
they leaven the whole heavy mass of album 
verse. Shall not a century of extortion on the 
one side and debility on the other be forgiven, 
because upon one blank page, the property of 
one thrice fortunate young woman, were written 
these lines, fragrant with imperishable senti- 
ment : — 

When he was young as you are young, 
When he was young, and lutes were strung, 
And love-lamps in the casement hung. 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 247 

But when we turn to Lamb, and find him 
driving his pen along its unwilling way, and 
admitting ruefully that the road was hard, we 
see the reverse of the medal, and we resent 
that inexplicable sweetness of temper which 
left him defenceless before marauders. 

My feeble Muse, that fain her best would 
Write at command of Frances Westwood, 
But feels her wits not in their best mood. 

Why should Frances Westwood have com- 
manded his services? Why should Frances 
Brown, " engaged to a Mr. White," have wrung 
from him a dozen lines of what we should now 
call " copy " ? She had no recognizable right to 
that copy ; but Lamb confided to Mrs. Moxon 
that he had sent it to her at twenty-four hours' 
notice, because she was going to be married and 
start with her husband for India. Also that he 
had forgotten what he had written, save only 
two lines : — 

May your fame 
And fortune, Frances, Whiten with your name ! 

of which conceit he was innocently proud. 

Mrs. Moxon (Emma Isola) was herself an 
old and hardened offender. Her album, enriched 



248 THE ALBUM AMICORUM 

with the spoils of a predatory warfare, travelled 
far afield, extorting its tribute of verse. We 
find Lamb first paying, as was natural, his 
own tithes, and then actually aiding and abet- 
ting injustice by sending the book to Mr. Proc- 
ter (Barry Cornwall), with an irresistible 
appeal for support. 

"I have another favour to beg, which is the 
beggarliest of beggings ; a few lines of verse 
for a young friend's album (six will be enough). 
M. Burney will tell you who I want 'em for. 
A girl of gold. Six lines — make 'em eight — 

signed Barry C . They need not be very 

good, as I chiefly want 'em as a foil to mine. 
But I shall be seriously obliged by any refuse 
scraps. We are in the last ages of the world, 
when St. Paul prophesied that women should 
be ' headstrong lovers of their own wills, having 
albums.' I fled hither to escape the albumean 
persecution, and had not been in my new house 
twenty-four hours when a daughter of the next 
house came in with a friend's album, to beg a 
contribution, and, the following day, intimated 
she had one of her own. Two more have sprung 
up since. ' If I take the wings of the morning. 



THE ALBUM AMICORUM 249 

and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, 
there will albums be.' New Holland has albums. 
The age is to be complied with." 

" Ask for this little book a token of remem- 
brance from friends, and from fellow students, 
and from wayfarers whom you may never see 
again. He who gives you his name and a few 
kind words, gives you a treasure which shall 
keep his memory green." 

So wrote Goethe — out of the abyss of Ger- 
man sentimentality — in his son's album ; and 
the words have a pleasant ring of good fellow- 
ship and unforced fraternity. They are akin to 
those gracious phrases with which the French 
monarchy — *' despotism tempered by epigram" 
— was wont to designate the taxes that de- 
voured the land. There was a charming polite- 
ness in the assumption that taxes were free 
gifts, gladly given ; but those who gave them 
knew. 



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